Pandora day 1.5--[Solved: FYI, SD-installer did not work right]

[Axman]

Howdy.

First, yay!

Second, aw fuck. I turned it on, and got many of the problems reflected in this post:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/8052-new-owner-with-a-bunch-of-problems/

I see that it's an older post but decide that I should be running the firmware off the SD card, anyway. I used this method to set up a card:

http://www.pandorabits.org/index.php?page=sd-installer

And then I rebooted. And waited. Then got dinner, and stayed out drinking coffee in the cold with friends. I come back four hours later and I see my Pandora has the same blank screen as when I left. I thought something went wrong so I started over. But it's doing the same thing. 

So now I've re-formatted the SD card, set it up again with a 900 meg root partition, a 1 gig swap partition, and a sixty-ish gig boot partition (I think I got those partition names right). I'm just going to let it run overnight, but does this seem out of line? It got warm after the first attempt, and I'm pretty sure it's working, but I got no flashing SD lights, just the power light. 

 

[freamon]

I'm fairly sure you can't boot off of a SDXC card, irrespective of how you format it.

If you want to run your OS from a SD card, you're better off putting it on a normal SD or SDHC card, and using your 64 gig card in slot 2 for data.

 

[Axman]

OK, I tried with an SD card, during the process it threw an error and rebooted, but now when I boot I get the message:

init: id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

and then it just loops every five minutes. 

I'm shutting it off to conserve battery at this point. I don't know how many tries I have left while it can't be charged. 

 

[Gandi]

You might want to try to getting the latest SD-Installer from the repo.

I had problems with an older version of the installer together with the latest Firmware, too (see this thread for details).

Thankfully Notaz fixed the issue very quickly.

Another Installer you could try is Linux-SWAT's SL4P Installer.

 

[Axman]

I will try that but I cannot boot from NAND. 

Is there a process for constructing a boot SD card from another computer that I should be using?

http://pandorawiki.org/Running_Linux_from_an_SD_card

I found this. Is there any reason I shouldn't try this method?

 

[FaeMinx]

... i smell a fish... perhaps this is the second time we've seen a hardware error from the new production process.

Still, excellent success rate with the new production... seems we've encountered a new fault (I could be speaking too soon).

 

[ingoreis]

Here can you Try this Way under Win95 then have you Slackware for more testing:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/10548-acutal-slackware-14-fixed-imageinstall-under-windows-to-sd/page-2?hl=slackware#entry206504

 

[Axman]

Still getting the same issue with an SD card set up manually. 

In fact, the Pandora doesn't even detect the SD card when booting with R depressed, in either slot, with either boot.txt files or autoboot.txt files. 

Is there any way to re-flash the NAND?

 

[Ian J]

Firmware and instructions here:

http://pandorawiki.org/Firmware

 

[Axman]

Awesome, I found an SD card it could detect and flashed it and now it boots normally.
 
But I'm still getting the same error when I try to set up a boot SD card (using the latest SD-installer.pnd). It gets about 90 percent of the way there and throws "Error: could not extract files from archive." 
 

So I stick the card in my Linux machine, go to make it manually, and here's the rub: the SD-installer made the ROOT partition too small. Not large enough to extract pandora-rootfs.tar.bz2 into. Also, SD-installer created the partitions in the wrong order, fdisk+gparted lists them as /sdb1 BOOT, /sdb2 swap, and /sdb3 ROOT. Documentation has it BOOT, ROOT, swap. 

Manual attempt take two. 

Success!