no sd boot from power on - but on reboot

[2nice]

Hi.

My father in law has a plug which I set up for him as a squeezeboxserver.

When we power on it will not boot on the sd card where the squeezebox server resides, but when we issue a 'reboot' command in the internal Ubuntu os - the plug boots nicely on the sd card.

Any ideas why this behaviour?

The sd card is a sandisk class 10 4 gb card. The image is squeezebox server image obtained from http://squeezeplug.de/?page_id=2 where Thomas has put together a nice image :-).
 

/Bo.

[NewIT_Marcus]

Try amending the bootcmd_mmc environment variable (or whatever equivalent you are using) to include mmcinit twice, ie:

Code:

mmcinit; mmcinit; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x800000 /uImage; bootm 0x00800000

Instead of :

Code:

mmcinit; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x800000 /uImage; bootm 0x00800000

[2nice]

Hi Marcus.
Thanks. - Could you tell me in which file I'll find the environment variable you mention? I assume it's on the internal Ubuntu OS, right?

/Bo

[NewIT_Marcus]

In U-Boot.

Connect via the USB cable, reboot, interrupt the boot process and at the Marvell>> prompt type "printenv" to view your environment variables. You probably already did some work with them in order to set up SD card booting. Copy & paste them here if you don't know what to do next.

[2nice]

Thanks for quick reply.

I actually use the multiboot sheevaplug from NewIT and therfore I didn't do any tampering with the uboot vars. But after reading a bit in this forum - I'm not sure, that I dare to mess with these settings - as I understand I can brick the plug if I get i wrong - isn't that right?

When I get near the plug again - I'll try dumping out the environment vars from the Marwell prompt - just to have a look at them.

I wonder could it be the SD card which is actually too fast? The cards we get from NewIT is class 6 I belive - and we use class 10.

Regards, Bo.

[NewIT_Marcus]

You can't predict which cards will work best (or worst) on the Sheevaplug. I think that manufacturers are focused on the camera market; ease (or difficulty) of use for computer owners isn't something that they specifically design for. And although regular storage may not be such a big deal, using an SD card as a boot device does seem to be quite challenging.

Anyway, your environment variables are listed here; probably your simplest option is to change bootcmd:

from:

Code:

bootcmd=run bootcmd_mmc; run bootcmd_nand

to:

Code:

bootcmd=mmcinit;run bootcmd_mmc; run bootcmd_nand

To do that:

Code:

setenv bootcmd 'mmcinit;run bootcmd_mmc; run bootcmd_nand'
saveenv
reset

[2nice]

Hi Marcus.

Well that looks very simple ... I'll give it a go this weekend when I visit my father in law.

Thank you, as always for at quick and instructive reply.

Regards, Bo

[Manaslu]

........

Anyway, your environment variables are listed here; probably your simplest option is to change bootcmd:

from:

Code:

bootcmd=run bootcmd_mmc; run bootcmd_nand

to:

Code:

bootcmd=mmcinit;run bootcmd_mmc; run bootcmd_nand

To do that:

Code:

setenv bootcmd 'mmcinit;run bootcmd_mmc; run bootcmd_nand'
saveenv
reset

This works perfectly for my case, thanks.

[2nice]

Same here... solved.

After modifying my the boot settings on the sheevaplug - everything worked fine when boot from power on.
Thank you New-IT/Marcus.

Regards, Bo

[NewIT_Marcus]

Just to clarify why this works; mmc_init attempts to initialise the SD card - ie test for its presence, do whatever needs to be done to determine that there is a device attached to the SD card slot. Because some SD cards take longer than others to return good information, executing the command twice means you get twice as long for the intialisation to work.