Problems booting sdcreate image on BeagleBoard

Hi all,

It’s been nearly 20 years since I sold my A3000, and I’ve reminisced fondly many a time since. When I discovered recently that Riscos is still going and that I can run it on a Beagleboard I just couldn’t resist!!

So I bought a rev.c model to muck about with. I already have Ubuntu 10.10 booting on it, but I am having some bother getting it to boot Riscos, I’ll explain what I’ve done so far:

Using RPCEmu running Riscos5 I have been able to use SDCreate to make the “SDImage” file from the Beagleboard “riscos” ROM image. I have used Win32Diskimager to write the SDImage file to a 32MB sdcard, but I am getting the following error:

U-Boot 2010.03-rc2-00003-g7027d56-dirty (Mar 28 2010 – 21:14:26)

OMAP3530-GP ES3.0, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz
+ LPDDR/NAND
I2C: ready
DRAM: 128 MB
NAND: 256 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
mmc1 is available
reading uImage

• Unable to read “uImage” from mmc 0:1 **
  Wrong Image Format for bootm command
  ERROR: can’t get kernel image!
  >

Does anyone have any idea what I have done wrong? Or have any suggestions…

Kind regards all,

Marc

Or have any suggestions…

Dunno why it’s not working – but if you’re just desperate to get started before working out what the problem is, then you could try this old-ish image. (The BBxM image is named accordingly, should you need that.)

Wow! thanks for the speedy reply Trevor.

Yeah, it’s strange, I suspect that it may be bootloader related as it seems to be looking for a uImage file… Though the sdcard seems to be prepared as it is suggested it should, i.e.: FAT formatted 7.78MB partition with boot.scr, CMOS & riscos files…

I will try the image you have linked and report back. If that reports the same issue then I guess it must be something specific on my Beagleboard.

Thanks!

Same error with your image I’m afraid… Seeing as your image is a known good one I will look into the bootloader side of things on my Beagleboard a bit more.

Thanks

speedy reply

In fact, I was out for most of the day, but coincidentally just popped back to fetch something and happenned to see the message.

Same error with your image I’m afraid

Shame. I’m certain I used that image quite some time ago – it’s probably one I originally prepared on my RiscPC. As for the bootloader business, it sounds as if you may have a clearer idea about sorting this than me. If it’s a standard BeagleBoard then perhaps it could be a NAND issue.

When I discovered recently that Riscos is still going

Incidentally, how did you find out?

Ubuntu boots fine so I suspect the previous owner (I bought the beagleboard off ebay) configured it for that. I did spot a “dual boot Ubuntu / Risc os” page earlier so I’ll check that out for any useful info.

I found out about Risc OS Open during my Googling for Beagleboard stuff, I bought one originally to run as a simple home network server (dns/dhcp that sort of thing), and stumbled across the Riscos build.

I’m really glad to see it still going strong, and I was surprised by just how well I remembered it all when I used the emulator, it still seems more intuitive than Windows even after all these years…

OK I made some progress though I don’t yet really know what I am doing :-)

I checked out the dual-boot Linux/Riscos post (by Chris Hall) and determined that Riscos is booted with:

fatload mmc 0 0×80100000 riscos
go 0×80100000

It then boots, only to supervisor mind, I only have serial and dvi connected at the moment… still waiting for my usb hub etc. to arrive…

p.s. Doh! just opened the boot.scr file to find the same commands!!! So I guess I just need to get the boot process to launch this boot.scr file instead of uImage…

fatload mmc 0 0×80100000 riscos

go 0×80100000

For reference, the fatload business was included on the pre-SDCreate wiki page.

Yeah, it looks like the previous owner changed the u-boot environment settings to ignore the boot script. You should be able to reset the environment settings by entering the following at the u-boot prompt:

nand unlock
nand erase 260000 20000

Then reset the board and everything should be fine. Well, actually u-boot will probably start complaining about the environment settings being corrupt, but you can fix that by using ‘saveenv’ to write the defaults back into NAND. But make sure you do it after rebooting, otherwise you’ll save the previous owner’s settings back out instead of the default ones!

Also, are you sure this is a rev C board? All revision C boards should have 256MB of RAM, but u-boot is only reporting 128MB. See here for more info about the different board revisions. I suppose it’s possible that you might have a prototype board, or maybe your x-loader and u-boot versions are out of sync. The boards have two 128MB banks of DRAM. It used to be that x-loader would initialise one of them and u-boot would initialise the other, but I’m fairly certain that it was later changed so that x-loader would initialise both and u-boot would initialise neither. I’m not quite sure when this changeover occurred however.

I would suggest that you just try following the validation/recovery steps on the beagleboard wiki, but since there are several different guides it’s hard to know which one to recommend anymore (there’s BeagleBoardDiagnostics and BeagleBoardDiagnosticsNext, BeagleBoardRevCValidation versions one, two and three, and finally BeagleBoardRevC3Validation)

Thanks for the replies.

Trevor: thanks for the link, I missed that, don’t seem to be able to locate it via just browsing the site either… Looks like just what I need anyway, so will digest.

Jeffrey: Thanks, I will reset it as you suggest, I should have done that to begin with :-/ With regard to the revision, I am sure you are right, I am not even sure what made me think it was a rev.C now come to think of it.

I plan on getting the xM model if I get on alright with this.

It is actually the rev.B (B7) model that I have. Thanks Jeffrey for the heads up.