Software Kernel fails to load

[Final7King]

I’ve owned my Open Pandora for a while now and had the unit stored away for about a year with other handheld units, but when I went to play it recently the unit would tell me that the Kernel failed to load and I would need to reflash the unit. I reflashed the unit and it would work for a while before having the same issue where it tells me the Kernel failed to load and I would yet again need to reflash the unit. Also while turning the unit during the time it’s saying the Kernel failed to load, the screen would be real fuzzy and when I would try to reflash the unit, it wouldn’t until I would turn off the unit by taking out the battery and putting it back in multiple times until I was successful in loading up a non fuzzy screen while pushing the R1 button. I’m not very familiar with the hardware side of computers, but to me, I’d say there is something wrong with the built in memory that stores the operating system. Could that be possible or is this just something of the software aspect?

 

[levi]

Yes, if you're not using an SD card to load the OS which has gone bad, this might just be the first example of the inbuilt eMMC going rogue. Of course there might be something else wrong causing similar effects like a bad power supply to the emmc, but that's not known to age any faster than any other conventional electronics I'd suggest, while flash does age a little faster.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Some docs :
https://pandorawiki.org/Boot_setup
https://pandorawiki.org/Ångström

 

[levi]

That 'fuzzy' screen looks like some pictures I've seen of LCD cable failure by the way. It's a bit weird that removing and reinstalling the battery sometimes makes it better, but I guess the shaking around of the unit while you do that might be problematic.

Unfortunately it's a long time since I made my pandora boot from SD, and last time I looked I couldn't find the files I thought I'd used last time. But the wiki linked above shows everything I think I used to create my SD card.

 

[Farox]

uhmm for me the nand chip has some problems...maybe some solder joint are partlally made contact with the board. Try to inspect the board looking for some pin that do not touch properly.

 

[Final7King]

Awesome, thanks for the replies guys. I’ll give it a try with installing the OS directly to the SD card and see if that is a viable solution. I’ll reply if it works for others who may have the same issue to see the solution in the future. Thanks again!

 

[HelenF]

The basic SD boot (normal partition with boot.txt) still depends on an area at the start of the NAND, so if the NAND fails it's possible that won't work either. Sounds like you might have an intermittent fault with the basic SD boot, so who knows? If that does fail, you would need the MLO boot setup. The information scattered around on how to create such an SD card and how to boot it is very inconsistent, and I couldn't make it work previously.