Is it possible to force a firmware upgrade ?


thatgui

Advanced Member
Joined
Apr 2, 2009
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Unfortunately I currently have a support case where I am lost:

The user says he tried ti upgrade vie the "Upgrade OS" function, which failed. After reboot he only sees the login screen, but the Pandora won't accept any input. So he tried to do a reflash as described in the wiki, but the tool refuses to copy the data.

Is it possible to force the tool to copy the files over to the NAND ?
 
Wow..is is possible to boot from a SD Card Image?

Maybe its possible to delete the Data on the Nand with an SD card booted Linux Image on the Pandora.

I readed somewhere that with a light modificated boot.txt/autoboot.txt is it possible to make the NAND itself

visible as Drive.

When i renember right can you here reformat the Nand with Gparted and the Filesystem ubifs?

Notaz did this to reformat the Bootsector(Nand) in a nearly Case with a SD Card booted System:

sudo ubidetach /dev/ubi_ctrl -d 1
sudo ubidetach /dev/ubi_ctrl -d 0
sudo ubiformat /dev/mtd3 -s 512
 
 
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Isn't there also an potential issue that for a full reflash, you have to make sure of the exact formatting of the card being used? Could that be what's causing the error?
 
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The flash will force override all files anyway. 

I assume the flash programs md5sum has thrown an error that stopped the flash, in other words the SD card is broken. 
 
You can hold down R-shoulder button and choose "boot into CLI mode" (or something like that).

Than one can boot into command line.

Maybe he can login from there.

Unfortunately I'm not a command line gui so I can't tell you exactly what to do.

You should be able to enable Wifi/usb via the script and set up an internet connection manually.

Then upgrade again.

Unfortunately I don't know the command for it.

Or download the firmware again as what Elw3 said might have caused the problem.
 
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CLI mode is functional. Interestingly keyboard works fine here. If I try to boot normally I am stuck at the point my username is shown. No chance to hit enter or change the username.

I will try to redownload the roots image first. If this does not work, I will have some questions on how to turn on wifi etc. in terminal...

Thank you all for your helpful comments!
 
Here are the results:

u-boot.bin already flashed, skipped.

uImage already flashed, skipped.

uImage-26.27.57-omap1 already flashed, skipped.

uImage-3 already flashed, skipped.

root file system is missing, skipped.

rootfs.img is on the SD, I have just copied it again. Strange...
 
Found it. The other file (containing the md5 checksum) was somehow broken. Very misleading error message...

Pandora running fine again!
 
Found it. The other file (containing the md5 checksum) was somehow broken. Very misleading error message...

Pandora running fine again!
Make sure to check the card.

I have an 32gb card that does work fine except for one and only one bit. 

This bit was used by codeblocks, a very big pnd, that had one very very tiny function broken. Impossible to notice without md5 checkup. 

Broken storage is like a mine field, it can cause a black pixel in some never seen theme wallpaper file or it can cause whole system crashes when inside a binary.

In that sense its good to know that the flash sanity checks itself. 
 
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