Keyboard Not Found/Waiting for Boot Drive on Pandaboard

From his description it would appear that he downloaded a standard Pi image and went from there.

I’ll rephrase my question to Ralph – was the card originally set up using SystemDisc? I suspect not but I ask because if so and it’s subsequently limited to just 2GB then that’s something else I’m not aware of. By & large I’m still on something of a learning curve.

No I didn’t pre-format my bootable SD card to RISC OS filecode format. I just loaded the RPi image using the Windows Win32DiskImager utility.

As far as I know the RC12a RPi image available on this site is a filecore formatted SD card with a capacity of around 2Gbytes, regardless of whether you flash the image onto a 4Gbyte, 8Gbyte or whatever SD card. The RC12a RPi image also contains a smaller FAT16 partition to contain the various boot files etc. Apologies if the RISC OS filecore size now magically changes to fill the entire SD card’s free capacity recently – if so I’ve missed it !

I suspect that one bit reason for my apparent ease in getting my Pandaboard working using a modified RPi image is that Chris’s Panda boot images have fixed lots of previous issues with with Panda booting using RISC OS. Also I’m using an old Pandaboard rev. A3 whereas others reporting more ‘issues’ are using the faster ‘ES’ version.

Ralph

Apologies if the RISC OS filecore size now magically changes to fill the entire SD card’s free capacity recently – if so I’ve missed it !

No, it doesn’t, you’ve not missed anything! However, SystemDisc does allow you to both set up the FAT 32 boot loader partition and use filecore over the rest of a larger SD Card, hence my being able to use the whole of a (nominally :-) 32GB card.

No, they pretty much always represented binary powers

Only in the computer industry. Everywhere else in science and engineering, where the terms originated, they were powers of 10. The computer industry came along later and started misusing them.

Only in the computer industry.

…well, I can’t imagine that kilobyte would be a useful measurement to anybody else. :-)

I’ve uploaded a guide to getting going with the Pandaboard

One thing I would amend here is in Section 1.3. – Connect the Pandaboard where it says “A power supply of at least 5V, 2.5A.” This might imply that a PS of 50V would be better! Better phrasing would be “A 5V power supply of at least 2.5A.”

One thing I would amend here is in Section 1.3

Feel free to edit things while you’re logged in. No one ever objects to useful alterations.
Not round here anyway.

Better phrasing would be “A 5V power supply of at least 2.5A.”

Agreed, that’s much better – we don’t want to fry any Pandaboards! :-)

Feel free to edit things while you’re logged in.

I’d second that.

I’d also like to suggest to Ralph that he adds something based on his experience of modifying a Raspberry Pi SD card. It’s all grist to the mill.

I plan to modify the Pandaboard Wiki, to include a section on getting the Panda booted using a modified Raspberry Pi 2GB filecore image (e.g. RC12a), i.e. with the boot files in the FAT16 partition replaced accordingly. This method appears to be the easiest method of getting a Pandaboard working up and running with RiscOS, apart from purchasing a pre-installed SD Panda card;-)

The big advantage of using a pre-installed image is that most/all of the RISC OS files are already in the correct locations, and also any personal set-up or application changes/additions that you made on your RPi are automatically transferred to your Panda :-)

My Pandaboard is a rev. A3 ‘old-style’ 1Ghz board. What I’m unclear about is whether you can use this method to get the more recent pandaboard ES running ?

Ralph

What I’m unclear about is whether you can use this method to get the more recent pandaboard ES running ?

Mine’s a Pandaboard ES Rev B3 and unfortunately, as I mentioned yesterday, it didn’t work too well for me, lots of peculiar boot-up errors. However, it’s not impossible that it was down to some error on my part or maybe I’ve been unlucky again in getting another slightly dodgy Pandaboard (unlikely, I know, but if it was from the same batch as the first..)

Is there any other owner of a P/B ES Rev B3 who could give Ralph’s method a go?