Is this plug broken? (long post...)

[wrzlbrmpft]

Hi there,
I just got my Sheevaplug from NewIT and started playing around with it. However, I get the feeling that the device they sent me is broken somehow, since none of the things I tried did work. I'd just like you guys to confirm this and tell me I didn't do something stupid... In case it actually is broken I'd then send the plug back and ask for replacement.

Here's what I did:

1) When I first got the plug I connected to it via the serial console just fine. The original Ubuntu started ok, I logged in, followed the instructions here: http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/New_Plugger_How_To#Fixing_the_existing_Ubuntu_install, set the date with ntpdate-debian and ran "hwclock -w" as I intended to install debian to an SDcard (following Martin Michlmayr's instructions on cyrius.com).
After a reboot the plug wouldn't start any more, stating a CRC checksum error...

2) OK, the internal Ubuntu didn't work any more. I went on to install Debian via the installer, anyhow. Upgrading U-Boot to 3.4.19 from a tftp server went ok.
Put in the SDcard, started the debian installer with images loaded from my tftp server. The installer worked well until it reached partitioning of the SDcard. Errors re-reading the partition table, errors creating the file-system and so on in several tries... I didn't have a Linux available with an SDcard reader, so I couldn't create and format the partitions elsewhere.

3) Fine, SD didn't work. Took a USB stick and tried the installer there. Also some problems with partitioning and formating the partitions, but I got it to work somehow and the installation went through. But after the final reboot and according changes to the U-Boot environment it didn't find the USB stick. No matter if directly connected or through a hub:

(Re)start USB...
USB:   scanning bus for devices... 2 USB Device(s) found
       scanning bus for storage devices... Device NOT ready
   Request Sense returned 05 24 00Hi there, 

Great...

4) All right. Tried the manual method of cyrius.com with unpacking the lenny tarball. Fired up Knoppix on a computer with a USB-SDcard-Reader so I could directly access the card under linux. All seems fine (besides a wrong /etc/fstab boot mountpoint in the tarball in the commented out lines for SDcards: it should read "/boot" not just "boot")

Anyways, changed the U-Boot environment settings to SD card and restarted the plug. It loads the debian kernel from the SDcard. Success? :-) But then the terminal was just throwing errors, one after the other. Uncorrectable errors: bad mtdblock0, I/O errors,...

I have put an example of a bootlog here: http://pastebin.com/d2475efe5

OK, noSDcardforme.

5) As a last resort, tried the manual tarball with a usb stick, also. No luck, still not finding any USB storage devices. I give up.


All right, whoever made it up to here in the post (I'm glad you did!): Have I done anything stupid? Or can I safely assume the plug I got is defect and ask NewIT for replacement?

[kilowatt]

Booting from USB has problems when more than one USB device is attached.  Try connacting only your USB drive and see if it boots.  Then run some tests from there to see if your SDcard is working.  Also try a different SDcard.

[wrzlbrmpft]

Booting from USB has problems when more than one USB device is attached.  Try connacting only your USB drive and see if it boots.  Then run some tests from there to see if your SDcard is working.  Also try a different SDcard.

I tried two different usb sticks, both directly connected or through a hub. No luck, the plug does not find a storage device on US, although it finds two USB devices (the internal USB hub and the stick).

I also tried a different SDcard, finally this one worked without I/O errors and I get a debian login. Yippieh :-)

The two USB-sticks which wouldn't get detected by U-Boot actually work fine on the plug under a running debian... Hopefully this detection issue will be fixed in some later versions of U-Boot? It'd be nice to be able to boot from USB, too. Or maybe I just have to try many different sticks in order to find one that works?


BTW, I still get these dmesg errors which worry me a little - is the internal NAND damaged, maybe?:

[    0.870000] NAND device: Manufacturer ID: 0xad, Chip ID: 0xdc (Hynix NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit)
[    0.880000] Scanning device for bad blocks
[    0.880000] Bad eraseblock 1 at 0x000000020000
[    0.890000] Bad eraseblock 6 at 0x0000000c0000
[    0.890000] Bad eraseblock 13 at 0x0000001a0000
[    0.910000] Bad eraseblock 270 at 0x0000021c0000
[    0.920000] Bad eraseblock 550 at 0x0000044c0000
[    0.940000] Bad eraseblock 813 at 0x0000065a0000
[    0.950000] Bad eraseblock 934 at 0x0000074c0000
[    0.950000] Bad eraseblock 952 at 0x000007700000
[    1.000000] Bad eraseblock 2145 at 0x000010c20000
[    1.050000] Bad eraseblock 3435 at 0x00001ad60000
[    1.080000] Creating 3 MTD partitions on "orion_nand":
[    1.080000] 0x000000000000-0x000000100000 : "u-boot"
[    1.090000] uncorrectable error : <5>0x000000100000-0x000000500000 : "uImage"
[    1.100000] uncorrectable error : <5>0x000000500000-0x000020000000 : "root"

And I also have these errors on mtdblock0 (but Martin Michlmayr actually warns about errors on mtdblock1):

Begin: Assembling all MD arrays ... [    4.370000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 1920
[    4.370000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 240
[    4.390000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 1920
[    4.390000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 240
[    4.400000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 2032
[    4.410000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 254
[    4.420000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 2032
[    4.420000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 254
[    4.510000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 1920
[    4.520000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 240
[    4.530000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 1920
[    4.530000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 240
[    4.550000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 2032
[    4.550000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 254
[    4.560000] uncorrectable error : <3>uncorrectable error : <3>end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock0, sector 2032
[    4.570000] Buffer I/O error on device mtdblock0, logical block 254
mdadm: No arrays found in config file or automatically
Failure: failed to assemble all arrays.
done. 

[ruidc]

did you get anywhere further with this? i'm also getting occasional read/write failures to a USB stick and problems in u-boot on reboot, but they go  away after a couple of minutes unplugged.

[wrzlbrmpft]

did you get anywhere further with this? i'm also getting occasional read/write failures to a USB stick and problems in u-boot on reboot, but they go  away after a couple of minutes unplugged.

I haven't tried any further with booting from USB after I found my original problems were due to the particular SDcard I used. I have never succeeded in booting from USB, but I can access USB just fine when being in Debian booted from a SDcard.