[Gta04-owner] Help with a bricked GTA04...

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi,

Am 13.03.2015 um 05:25 schrieb NeilBrown <neilb at suse.de>:

> 
> Hi,
> my GTA04 has turned into a brick, and I cannot succeed in unbricking it.
> 
> I managed to get a old x-load.bin installed in the NAND flash which doesn't
> recognise the 1GB flash chip.
> So when I boot without holding 'aux' down it says:
> 
> Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.4ss modified for GTA04 (Nov 30 2012 - 14:24:46)
> Unknown chip: mfr was 0x2c, id was 0xb3
> Unsupported Chip!

Yes, that one is too old.

The latest sources are here:

http://git.goldelico.com/?p=gta04-xloader.git;a=summary

> 
> 
> If I try booting with the AUX key down, it first tries a serial boot and then
> after a timeout it tries to boot from NAND again and fails again.
> I thought that it would try to boot from MMC inbetween those two, but
> apparently not. (previously I always boot entirely from MMC).

That depends on what is on the MMC and if the MLO there is really bootable.
It needs a special position on the SD card - and in my experience overwriting
it several times may also make it unbootable.

But you might not even recognize that the MLO on the SD card is broken, as
long as an X-Loader can start from NAND.

> 
> So I read through 
>   http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/page/SerialBoot/
> 
> and tried it all out, but I cannot make it work.

Well, it did work once ago, but it should not be needed any more.

> 
> pserial seems to successfully upload the x-load.bin, but ukermit never does
> anything useful.
> If I start a terminal program after pserial finishes, then I either get
> complete silence or an infinite stream of
> 
>  X-Loader hangs
> 
> messages, sometimes precede by an "Unsupported chip" message.  When I compile
> x-load myself it gives me complete silence. If it printed something I might
> be able to work with it, but ... nothing.

Well, serial booting also needs an x-loader variant that supports the NAND chip.

> 
> Any suggestions?  Either to figure out what is wrong with x-load, or to get
> the gta04 to boot from MMC despite there appearing to be something valid in
> NAND.

Please use the new makesd script to get a production image for the boot system.
This one should always boot from MMC (by pressing the AUX button):

http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-makesd/

DEV=/dev/sdc ./makesd gta04

It will automatically flash a new x-loader and boot scripts (but no kernel or rootfs)
on first boot.

Hope this helps,
Nikolaus