TonidoPlug UART connect same as mini USB?

[dapostman]

Hi there,

I bricked my tonidoplug  by fussling around with it, to the point where is will not either come up on the network, or boot an external usb for recovery.

So, I took it apart (knew I would anyways; that's how I learn)

My board is marked "Power Plug Rev1.3", which looks to be the same as the current sheevaplug (yes?) The board locations for the eSATA connector, the SD connector, and the miniUSB connector are bare, as Tonido doesn't want you to play with them .

My question is "can I access this board using a usb-serial cable connected to the UART connector, just like a SheevaPlug?"


I'd like to get this running again, so I can learn some more. Your help is greatly appreciated in advance.

[Schmerm]

Did you accidentally flash mtd0? If not, you should still be able to boot off USB (it's worth trying this first before resorting to more extreme measures). By default on TonidoPlug, uBoot will try to load the kernel from /boot/uImage on your ext2/3/4-formatted USB device. There should also be a couple of .ko files in /boot (vfat, fat, and, uh, something else), and I remember things not working unless they were there (I don't know why). You can find those in the rootfs.gz file on the TonidoPlug support/forums.

When I "bricked" my TonidoPlug, I formatted a disk ext3, unpacked a rootfs.gz for Debian (NOT the one for TonidoPlug which is Ubuntu), and then added the .ko module files to /boot. Then the plug booted into Debian from the disk no problem.

I haven't actually taken apart the plug myself, and I'm curious -- is there actually a header/connector for the serial UART? Or was that supposed to have been provided via the miniUSB?