Flash unsuccessful

Hi everyone,

I seem to have an issue when flashing a new beaglebone black Rev C. On my "master" beaglebone black Rev. C, I can successfully (I think) clone the disk image to a uSD card. Then, after editing the autostart file appropriately, I plugged the uSD card into the new beaglebone black, and was able to get it to boot and start to clone (USR0 flashing in a non-heartbeat fashion and whatnot). However, the "flashing" process seems to only take like 5 minutes, and once its done and I remove the card and reboot, the beaglebone won't boot up at all. I've tried recloning my master beaglebone multiple times, and making some of the slight variations of edits to the autostart file as recommended in this discussion, but I can't seem to get a bootable image to clone to the fresh beaglebone. Am I doing something wrong? My master beaglebone uses about 3GB of the eMMC, but the cloned image is more like 1GB. I read that you can only clone 2GB, am I getting messed up since I'm trying to clone 3GB? Or is the cloned image only showing up as ~1GB because it's compressed on the fly while it's cloning (I do use the gzip command in the autostart file). What am I doing wrong and why can't I seem to get this to work?

Thanks!

Mgeorgia (talk)

UPDATE:

So I was unable to get the flash to work, but I think I figured out in general what was causing the issue. All of the beaglebones I have are Rev. C, however one was from Element14 and is a little older, and the others were just recently purchased from a source other than Element14 (unsure of the actual source, someone else at work bought them). Anyways, I was trying to flash the image from the older Element14 beaglebone to the newer beaglebone and figured that should work since they were all Rev. C beaglebones. I tried all sorts of variations on the clone and flash process, but was never able to get it to work. However, I setup one of the newer beaglebones with the exact same OS, apps, and settings as the Element14 beaglebone, and was able to successfully clone that beaglebone image to another one of the newer beaglebones. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but I figured this information might be useful to someone else who might be running into similar issues.

Something odd or different must have been going on with the Element14 beaglebone image that, when flashed to the newer beaglebone, was causing it to not boot properly (see the above post). If anyone has any thoughts, I'd definitely love to hear them. Thanks!

Mgeorgia (talk)

Hi, since I spent two hours figuring out how the backup of the interal emmc storage works, here is how I got it running on a recent REV C BBB from Element14:

• The SD-card really has to be formatted with FAT16, which is only possible with SD-cards <= 4 GB

1. * Open a command window and enter diskpart
2. * Select the SD-card as disk with select disk (list disk shows all disk)
3. * Enter clear (make really sure, that you selected the SD-card)
4. * Keep diskpart open
5. * Open the disk-management in Windows
6. * Create a new partition with exactly 4048 MB and format it with FAT16
7. * Go back to diskpart, enter "select partition 1" and afterwards active
8. * Create a folder "dtds" on the SD-card

• Copy the entire content of https://s3.amazonaws.com/beagle/beagleboneblack-save-emmc.zip on the sd-card

Copy am335x-boneblack.dtb into the dtds folder Insert the SD-card into the BBB and just power it up (no need to hold down the S2-button)

The USR0 LED should start blinking in a regular pattern (not the heartbeat pattern)

But now the backup solution works really fine and is perfect to clone a running configuration for the BBB onto further BBBs.

Ntnumartin (talk)

Very Important:

When using the REV C BBB from element14, the folder created should be named "dtbs". The above post has a mistake.

Brghena (talk)