Reflashing a bricked U-Boot

[Rabeeh Khoury]

Nicolas Pitre added openocd support for the plug (thanks nico).
A nice wiki page from Tim Ellis (thanks Tim) describing building openocd, and using it to reflash the plug.

http://www.openplug.org/plugwiki/index.php/Setting_Up_OpenOCD_Under_Linux

[lamestllama]

tried this to see if it would work it and ended up with a bricked uboot. Strange because it does say it is writing to NAND etc but then when I reboot I cant get uboot on the serial terminal and only the green light is on not the blue one. Anybody have any ideas on what I try next ?

[bfmorgan]

Have you followed the USB recovery instruction at http://www.marvell.com/files/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/SheevaPlug_DocumentationPackage.zip . Also, use the ubuntu-9.0.5.Release.jffs2 file from the CD that came with the plug (The one that has been on the Marvell site is bad). This will help recover the plug if it is truely bricked.

Can you post your uboot log, after the U-boot completes stop the booting while connected to the mini-usb console by pressing "enter" before the timeout and do a printenv. This will give you the env variables that uboot is using. Then type reset and let it boot. Capture that and post that as well.

This has happened to a lot of us and is now very easy to fix.

[lamestllama]

I dont have a working uboot. The plug ran for 2-3 days then for 2-3 more with a sd card mounted as root. during this time I had access to uboot and a terminal via the serial port with no problems. Today I looked at dmesg and saw all thes JFFS2 errors. I rebooted and nothing came up no uboot and no blue light on the end. 

[bfmorgan]

Were you connecting via the mini-usb connector?

[lamestllama]

Not at the time but as soon as I couldn't ssh in over the ethernet I connected the mini usb. I had used this many times so I knew that my setup should work. I then found that I could no longer connect  

I have since followed the instructions on the wiki to use openocd to reflash uboot initially it looked like it worked (see output below) but I still can not connect via the mini usb.  Also if this is any indication of anything happening/not happening the blue led no longer lights up.

here is the openocd output :-

eric$ openocd -f /usr/local/lib/openocd/board/sheevaplug.cfg -c init -c sheevaplug_reflash_uboot
Open On-Chip Debugger 1.0 (2009-04-29-00:01) svn:1555M


BUGS? Read http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/BUGS


$URL: svn://svn.berlios.de/openocd/trunk/src/openocd.c $
3000 kHz
dcc downloads are enabled
Info : JTAG tap: feroceon.cpu tap/device found: 0x20a023d3 (Manufacturer: 0x1e9, Part: 0x0a02, Version: 0x2)
Info : JTAG Tap/device matched
Error: unknown EmbeddedICE version (comms ctrl: 0x00000018)
Warn : no telnet port specified, using default port 4444
Warn : no gdb port specified, using default port 3333
Warn : no tcl port specified, using default port 6666
target state: halted
target halted in ARM state due to debug-request, current mode: Supervisor
cpsr: 0x000000d3 pc: 0xffff0000
MMU: disabled, D-Cache: disabled, I-Cache: disabled
0 0 1 0: 00052078
NAND flash device 'NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit' found
successfully erased blocks 0 to 4 on NAND flash device 'NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit'
wrote file uboot.bin to NAND flash 0 up to offset 0x00073000 in 84.556076s






 

[lamestllama]

Hi all I fixed this

It was suggested I press the big red button before and after flashing. I did this and first attempt got me uboot flashed and working. I would add it to the wiki if this was confirmed by somebody whon knows what the big red button is for.

[Rabeeh Khoury]

The big red button should be a simple reset to the board.
Probably the same thing can be reached while pressing the hidden button with a paper clip (without opening the box).

[_maxx_]

I had also to flash a new U-Boot because unfortunately I wrote onto mtd0 instead of 2 
It did not work for the first time although without writing errors or something. I let the plug over night and decided to try the red button but the next day it suddenly worked again.
A bit strange but the outside placed reset button should do its work.