How to reflash when right shoulder button is broken [solved]


mcrobinson8

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Feb 15, 2011
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Last night something got messed up on my Pandora and I could not login to XFCE.  It would boot and accept my login but one of the scripts would fail, the desktop would not load, and I was back at the login prompt.  This morning I decided to do a full reflash of the most recent SuperZaxxon and prepared a fat-formated SD card with the appropriate files.  I was then confronted with the problem that my right shoulder button has been broken for about a year.  I don't use the shoulder buttons that much so never bothered to send the unit in to get fixed.  My dilemma was that the right shoulder button is used to trigger the boot from the SD card to initiate the re-install of the firmware.

The file that kicks things off is boot.src. Searching around the boards and wiki I saw that you can place an autoboot.txt file on the SD card to trigger an automatic boot off the SD card without having to use the right shoulder button.  A little searching on the web led me to a command to place in the autoboot.txt file that would load the boot.src file and start the reflash:

setenv bootcmd  ’mmc init;fatload mmc 0 0x82000000 boot.scr; source 0x82000000’

This worked and my reflashed Pandora is working fine.  I posted this just in case someone else runs into the same problem.
 
According to the wiki, you can boot an OS off an SD card in the right slot by creating a boot.txt file set to mmcblk1p1.  Assuming you have formatted your card with ext2 and you load the kernel off the SD card:

setenv bootargs root=/dev/mmcblk1p1 rw rootwait vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K mmc_core.removable=0
ext2load mmc 0 0x80300000 /boot/uImage
bootm 0x80300000

However this boot.txt would need to reside in fat partition on an SD card in the left slot, which would not do you any good if that slot is dead.

You could try modifying the boot menu on the nand (/boot/bootmenu.txt) that's displayed when you press the right shoulder button when booting.  The default file has entries in the following format:

# The format of this file is:
# <menu option name>|<u-boot commands>
Boot older 2.6.27 kernel (OMAP-only)|setenv bootargs 'ubi.mtd=4 ubi.mtd=3 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs rw rootflags=bulk_read vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K quiet'; ubi part boot && ubifsmount boot && ubifsload ${loadaddr} uImage-2.6.27.57-omap1 && bootm ${loadaddr}
Boot in CLI mode (kernel 3.2)|setenv bootargs 'ubi.mtd=4 ubi.mtd=3 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs rw rootflags=bulk_read vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K mmc_core.removable=0 psplash=false 3'; ubi part boot && ubifsmount boot && ubifsload ${loadaddr} uImage-3 && bootm ${loadaddr}
Boot with RAM cut for DSP (2.6.27) (OMAP-only)|setenv bootargs 'ubi.mtd=4 ubi.mtd=3 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs rw rootflags=bulk_read vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K mem=96M@0x80000000 mem=128M@0x88000000'; ubi part boot && ubifsmount boot && ubifsload ${loadaddr} uImage-2.6.27.57-omap1 && bootm ${loadaddr}
 

Assuming you have formatted your card with ext2 and you load the kernel off the SD card, you could try adding an entry like:

Boot off right SD card | setenv bootargs 'root=/dev/mmcblk1p1 rw rootwait vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K mmc_core.removable=0'; ext2load mmc 0 0x80300000 /boot/uImage && bootm 0x80300000

Please note that I have not tested this at all, this is just a suggested way of tackling the problem.  Others with more knowledge can comment if this a problematic, futile, or dangerous way of trying to do this.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Since your shoulder button is broken, I just like to point out, that it's easy to repair the button yourself.

Possible just the plastic is stuck - just unscrew the buttom of the pandora and fix it.

If you can do soldering, you can also resolder the button if it just got torn off the solder pads. It has to be perfectly centered though, or the mchanics won't work. On my pandora the button was totally smashed, so I just asked ED to send me a new one.

Well, if the solder pad itself is torn off than you're out of luck. But as I said, when my pandora fell down, the button was totally smashed and torn off the pad, so the pad itself seems to be quite resilient - otherwise I had a lot of luck.

But don't do that yourself if you don't have any experience with soldering.
 
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