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

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi Neil,
did you succeeed?

BR,
Nikolaus

Am 13.03.2015 um 22:00 schrieb Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns at goldelico.com>:

> 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
> 
> 
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