Dead plug - Please help me with steps to recover it

[warpcore]

I work in a lab and have a dead Sheeva Plug(or at least it appears dead). The guy who bricked it is no longer available, so I can't reach him either. So all I am left with is a dead plug which I need to bring up to a working state.

My main problem is that I am not able to serial into the plug. All my settings are right in putty. I was thinking of rebuilding the entire image from scratch and trying to reload the image into the plug, but wanted to know if a simpler solution existed. Right now, when I plug it in, I can see *both* green and blue LEDs lighting up. So only issue is that I can't serial into it. But when I plug in an USB into the miniUSB port, I do get a ttyUSB1 in my linux /dev directory. dmesg also confirms the fact that it was recognized properly as an FTDI device. Using minicom to connect to ttyUSB1 with the recommended settings does not bring up the console

What would you guys recommend as the first step to unbrick this plug ? Or is there anything that I might be doing wrong.

Thanks in advance for your help.

regards,
Seemanta

[marcus]

Try to ssh in to it. There's one version of U-Boot that produces no output on the console, so without ssh'ing in you are omitting a potentially useful test.

[warpcore]

Thanks for your reply. I did make some progress on it yesterday. Now I am able to serial into it. Seems, I was serialing in after the plug attempted to boot and the kernel was hosed. Hence, serialing produced a blank screen. Now if I serial in as soon as I power it up, I can see the U-Boot prompt.

I did some searching on the net and was able to load Debian lenny onto a pen drive and boot the plug off it. But the next step now is to flash the NAND with the Debian installation and that is where I am blocked right now. I am trying the steps mentioned in: http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Installing_Debian_To_Flash  but it mentions using 'ubiformat' at one point. Despite having installed mtd-tools, I am just not able to get where that binary is

As a result I am completely blocked on flashing the NAND with the Debian installation Any pointers would be greatly appreciated! My Debian works nicely off the thumbdrive though. I am able to get an IP using DHCP and also able to ping google.com etc. Everything is great, except that I want that to work off my NAND !!

Thanks!