ROM of 29/9/11 has long boot up time

I have just tried the recent rom-omap/5/17 on my BeagleBoard and from power on until usable desktop took 71 seconds. Is that normal? the previous ROM of around 5/12/10 took 44 seconds. The only other difference I can see is the SD card. The latest rom is on a 256MB card and the previous one on a 2GB card. I think the U-boot scripts are the same as they haven’t been changed and there is no change to the ‘Hard Disc’ (= USB stick). All the stages of the boot up took longer: Duration of Orange screen; duration of black screen (no text); and from there to usable desktop.

You may find that the wait period for drives to become ready has been increased.

Hey, the CMOS settings work! I just did a *SAVECMOS and called the file Cmos, saved it to the SD card (with the ROM and U-Boot script on) and it works. Alarm now gives the time in digital format, I mean no circular clock face. Great! I am not using SDCreate (Steve Revill please note).

I am not using SDCreate (Steve Revill please note).

Sorry – I’m being a bit slow here. What am I noting?

The only change I can think of that would have slowed down the boot time would have been the addition of the keyboard scanning code. But that should only add about 5 seconds. Maybe the CMOS RAM code is slowing things down a bit as well, especially if you’re using a slow card (A 256MB card sounds like it must be pretty old).

Have you tried using your 2GB card at all?

“I am not using SDCreate (Steve Revill please note).”

Only that I haven’t yet found a need for SDCreate. Perhaps it is more useful for the BeagleBoard XM where there are more files to save on the SD card?

haven’t yet found a need for SDCreate

"If you attempt to create an SD card manually then there are many places where things can go wrong […]"

Is there any advice on the capacity of USB sticks and SD cards for the Beagleboard? Also the class of the SD/SDHC cards?
(I know that the card needs to hold only a few MB for RISC OS, but most cards sold seem to be at least 4GB.)
Worse than the slow boot-up time mentioned in my previous post, with one of my USB sticks (Peak V 16GB) the BB goes only to supervisor prompt. I have noticed that, when this stick is stuck in my Iyonix, it takes 11 seconds for the root filer window to open. Is it because it is taking too long to access that causes the problem with my BB?
It used to work on the BB, but then there was less on the stick.

The problem with the 16GB USB stick turned out to be a clash of names for the name of the ‘drive’ in the !Run file of the !Boot directory. I named the stick HardDisc0, but in the !Run file there was a line
“RunRMEnsure Reporter 0.00 SCSI::HardDisc1.$.Utilities.!Reporter” .
Using Steve Fryatt’s Locate, the only further occurrences of HardDisc1 turned out to be innocuous, i.e., not read on booting. So this problem was easily solved.
I would still like to know what SD cards are recommended. The 4GB one I am using is class 2 and the 2GB one is unclassified.