Question

I have a Beagle board OMAP3530-GP and I had copied my kernel and rootfs into two partitions of the SDcard and wanted to boot it.

partition 1 of the SDcard: FAT32 boot partition
with the following files in the same order:
MLO
u-boot.bin
uImage
uInitrd

And in partition 2:
rootfs

Now I had initially booted it whereby I got:

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Feb 19 2009 - 12:01:24)
Reading boot sector
Error: reading boot sector
Loading u-boot.bin from nand


U-Boot 2011.03 (Apr 20 2011 - 07:19:53)

OMAP3530-GP ES3.0, CPU-OPP2, L3-165MHz, Max CPU Clock 600 mHz
OMAP3 Beagle board + LPDDR/NAND
I2C:   ready
DRAM:  256 MiB
NAND:  256 MiB
MMC:   OMAP SD/MMC: 0
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial                                                                                                                                                                   
Beagle Rev C1/C2/C3                                                                                                                                                             
timed out in wait_for_pin: I2C_STAT=0                                                                                                                                           
No EEPROM on expansion board                                                                                                                                                    
Die ID #5738000300000000040323091100e002                                                                                                                                        
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0                                                                                                                                                
MMC: block number 0x1 exceeds max(0x0)                                                                                                                                          
** Can't read from device 0 **                                                                                                                                                  

** Unable to use mmc 0:1 for fatload **                                                                                                                                         
MMC: block number 0x1 exceeds max(0x0)                                                                                                                                          
** Can't read from device 0 **                                                                                                                                                  

** Unable to use mmc 0:1 for fatload **                                                                                                                                         
Wrong Image Format for bootm command                                                                                                                                            
ERROR: can't get kernel image!  

I thought it had an earlier u-boot.bin in NAND that it was reading and wanted to erase it so in a freaky moment did:

OMAP3 beagleboard.org # nandecc sw                                                                                                                                              
SW ECC selected                                                                                                                                                                 
OMAP3 beagleboard.org # nand erase 0 80000                                                                                                                                      

NAND erase: device 0 offset 0x0, size 0x80000                                                                                                                                   
Erasing at 0x60000 -- 100% complete.                                                                                                                                            
OK                                                                                                                                                                              
OMAP3 beagleboard.org # nand erase 80000 160000                                                                                                                                 

NAND erase: device 0 offset 0x80000, size 0x160000                                                                                                                              
Erasing at 0x1c0000 -- 100% complete.                                                                                                                                           
OK

And booted again to only notice just a few non-readable serial characters and the bootloader not coming up anymore.

Then it hit me that I had perhaps deleted the X-loader 1.4.2 in the NAND!
I copied it into my boot partition so that the X-loader can be started from SDcard instead of NAND. However I see the same unreadable characters on power-on 🙁 🙁

What do I do?? How to get the bootloader working?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can prepare an sd-card with the x-loader(MLO) and u-boot.bin and boot from it as follows:

1. Power-off beagleboard
2. Copy MLO and u-boot.bin onto an sd-card(FAT32 partition).
3. Insert the sd-card
4. Press and hold the “user” key on the board
5. Power on the board (do NOT release the “user” key yet)

This forces the beagle to boot from sdcard. If both MLO and u-boot.bin are copied properly onto the sd-card, then one should see the u-boot prompt on the serial-console now. You can now fatload the binaries from the sd-card and flash to nand on the u-boot prompt.