pandaboard u-boot busted?

[gdkags]

Hi guys,
first time arm poster here.

Today I installed the distro for the pandaboard, but u-boot would show nothing over serial connection. And the board did not do anything, even after pressing the power switch on the board. the one on here seems to be busted.

I then tried the diagnostics boot from pandaboard.org and had no problem at all. I then left the first partition intact and reformated the second to have somewhat more space, extracted the rootfs and it worked.
Is there something that needs some fixin'? Or is this just me an this one?

I even tried this guide and the one on the platforms page. both have the same problem.

regards,
gdkags

[kmihelich]

When you build up your SD card, use the mkcard script provided to partition it. After you format it, make sure that MLO is the first file copied into it, then copy the rest in. When you don't see anything on serial, it just means that the board didn't like the setup of the SD card for whatever reason.

[gdkags]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kmihelich', 'W')hen you build up your SD card, use the mkcard script provided to partition it. After you format it, make sure that MLO is the first file copied into it, then copy the rest in. When you don't see anything on serial, it just means that the board didn't like the setup of the SD card for whatever reason.

[kmihelich]

You can always just piggyback off of a setup that works, I had a lot of problems myself getting my first card set up. Get a setup that works on the card, then just swap out the uImage and boot.scr/uEnv.txt if needed.

[gdkags]

Well, I believe that will be what I do. I guess the only way to debug this would be over JTAG?

Thank you for your support.

[DeJe]

I'm in the same boat.
I try to setup an SD-card for Arch ARM for several ways now and nothing works. I don't even get any output on the serial console.
On the same board, Oneiric Desktop, Server and the test environment from PandaBoard-site is working without problems. But for Arch, I have no idea anymore. Something is totally wrong with the instructions given...
At every power up the LEDs are always different, sometimes LED beside SD-Slot is on, sometimes both, sometimes the LED on the outside.

Could please someone provide a reliable way to at least boot into the serial console?

[kmihelich]

Are you using the mkcard.txt script, and ensuring that MLO is the first file copied in after formatting?

[DeJe]

Yes I did. I also did the manual way in partitioning and formatting the card.

[DeJe]

At least I got Arch running on my PandaBoard (it's revision A4 btw.).
I used the validation image from the PandaBoard site, dd'ed it on the sd card, resized rootfs and copied arch-rootfs on it. After that I copied my boot.scr and uimage to the boot partition. This way it worked. So I assume there is something wrong with bootloader from here.

Anyway, I got up and running.

[ykmag]

Thanks for the use validation image. That worked for me too, except for the modules. So if anyone knows where to obtain working modules for 3.0.4, please share that valuable knowledge.

Updated:
Solved it in a much better way: took uImage from the rootfs an put it into the first partition. worked.