Pandora won't boot

[Binary]

Hi all,

My Pandora won't boot!

The Booting Kernal 3.2 page appears and gets within about a centimetre away from completing the loading bar before freezing. Eventually an error message appears. First time this happened, i was aware that i hadn't used it for a while and plugged in the charger. Eventually the red light came on and the machine booted up okay.

Now it's gone back to stopping on the kernal boot screen again. 

Does anyone know what i can do about this? I've included the error page on an attached jpg.

I would be very grateful for any advice you can give me.

Cheers!

 

[levi]

Those file errors suggest you've filled up the drive with the OS on - probably the in-build NAND if you're not booting from SD.  If you want to add things to your OS, I'd suggest booting from SD, but otherwise I'd suggest not filling your NAND with cruft, and instead putting than on SD cards.

If you want to recover any of the stuff you've put on the NAND you'll need to learn how to boot from SD and mount the NAND and then copy stuff off.

Other than that, I'd suggest you reflash your unit; it's not hard (especially in comparison to creating a bootable SD card by hand).

 

[Binary]

Thanks for the assistance!

I am a real novice at these things. Can you tell me what kind of things and how the drive is being filled with so i can avoid it happening again? The only thing i though i was doing was putting .pnd emulators onto my SD card.

Can you confirm if this is what i need to reflash the unit? http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54991-ready-to-flash-firmware-image/

If i go down this route, will their be the danger that this will happen again?

Thank again!

 

[TrashyMG]

Thanks for the assistance!


I am a real novice at these things. Can you tell me what kind of things and how the drive is being filled with so i can avoid it happening again? The only thing i though i was doing was putting .pnd emulators onto my SD card.


Can you confirm if this is what i need to reflash the unit? http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54991-ready-to-flash-firmware-image/


If i go down this route, will their be the danger that this will happen again?


Thank again!

So something you should know, the internal memory that stores the OS only has 512MB and almost all of it is used by the OS itself. You have to be careful if you install anything to the internal memory as there is at most 100MBs of free space. Instead store things on the SD card memory.


So Wow that link is over 5 years old...


The Pandorawiki has a bit of information, but a bit convoluted for new users and someone really should revisit that page...


The latest firmware release is 1.72: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18363-superzaxxon-v172-released//URL]


Follow the instructions on the bottom of the first post labeled: "Upgrade instructions using the Full-Flash-Image" and that should get you going again.

 

[levi]

If all you did was put some PNDs on your SD card, your NAND really ought not to be filling up.  Something doesn't add up; either you did add stuff to your nand by accident, or your nand is not actually full.

That said, reflashing will bring the system back to factory settings, so should sort out any software problems, but you might lose anything you'd accidentally saved to SD.  If it's only PNDs you can always redownload those though.

Also, last time I checked, the instructions included with a release zip tell you everything you need to know about reflashing your unit, and are more up-to-date than what's on the wiki, so I'd suggest you just download that and do what it says in there.

 

[Binary]

Thanks for the help.

The method i use to put stuff on my Pandora is to take the SD card out, put it in my laptop, transfer the files and put it back in my Pandora! I don't see how i could have put anything on the internal drive (not that i'd know how anyway). Obviously i could have done it by mistake somewhere along the line.

I'll give it a go when my parental duties permit! Thanks again.

 

[notaz]

The 1.72 release has some measures to prevent filling up the NAND, hopefully it should help.

 

[Binary]

Great stuff. Hopefully i can get it up and running again.

 

[atari_afternoon]

I had the exact same problem earlier today. Doing a full reflash (had to take an older 16 GB card, after some panic hour, i realized that my main card 128GB somehow didn´t allow "Boot from SD card", found another topic here [https://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18363-superzaxxon-v172-released/?page=4#comment-406447] with that exact same problem described.

Thanks to your advice, it has worked