(wsl) Can't boot u-boot on beaglebone black

libercoinx · August 13, 2025, 12:10pm

I’m trying to boot U-Boot from an SD card on my BeagleBone Black , but the board shows no signs of life (all 4 LEDs remain off, only power signal is on). Neither SSH nor serial connection works.

here’s my sd card partition:

Device     Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1  *     2048 61067263 61065216 29.1G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

and i used below commands to flash u-boot in WSL

maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ sudo mount /dev/sdd1 ./boot
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ ls ./boot
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ sudo cp MLO ./boot
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ ls ./boot
MLO
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ sudo cp u-boot.img ./boot
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ ls ./boot
MLO  u-boot.img
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ sync
maroo@libercoinx:~/NuttxSpace$ sudo umount ./boot

After inserting the SD card into the BBB, I held down the boot button while powering on, but none of the four status LEDs illuminate. I’m unable to establish either SSH or serial connection to the board(through PuTTY).
devmgmt.msc shows:

lranders · August 13, 2025, 12:17pm

Try out the instructions here to get a better look at what’s going on!

Set your line-speed to 115200.

Feel free to post any output here, but please do enclose it in tripple-backticks for readability.

RobertCNelson · August 13, 2025, 12:36pm

You have a USB to serial adapter plugged into j1, so you can see what u-boot is doing right?

libercoinx · August 13, 2025, 5:55pm

THX for your reply!

yes I have a USB to serial adapter, but i can’t see any output.Is there anything wrong with my connection?

RobertCNelson · August 13, 2025, 5:57pm

With ‘nothing’ on the microSD, you’ll get a stream of CCCCCCC otherwise you’ll get u-boot info… so a good chance your TX/RX is reversed if you get nothing…

Regards,

lranders · August 13, 2025, 6:00pm

Yea, if I’m seeing those colors correctly, RX and TX are swapped.

You’ve got TX connected to TX and RX to RX… That’s wrong!

The good news is that I also see at least one-of-four Leds ON now, so it’s not completely dead.

libercoinx · August 14, 2025, 12:07pm

THX!!!
This is exactly where the problem is!
problem solved T_T