Flashing new Linux

[rsfairman]

I bricked my BBB, temporarily I hope, and it was purely my own fault. I accidentally removed libstdc.so (laugh if you must), and of course nothing works any more. In some ways I thought it would be a blessing in disguise since it's an opportunity to upgrade to jessie from wheezy.

However, I have been unable to boot from an sd card. I followed the directions at
http://derekmolloy.ie/write-a-new-image ... one-black/
That is, I went to
beaglebone.org/latest-images
and downloaded the image for jessie (the first one on the webpage). I then unpacked it with xz and ran dd to copy to the SD card. In more detail, I did:
xz -d bone*xz
inserted the sd card into my PC using a USB adapter, made sure it was not mounted and ran
dd if=bone*img of=/dev/sdb1

I put the card into the BBB, held down the button on the opposite side from the sd card, applied power and waited for the LEDs to blink. After three+ minutes, no blinking. The LED indicating that it has power is on. How long should I have to hold down this button?

It was a brand new SD card, but I tried repartitioning it, using fat32 and setting the boot flag, and went through the entire process again -- running dd to rewrite the disk image --, with the same result: nothing. I suspect that I just dug my hole deeper by messing with the partitions on the sd card. Should I partition the card in any particular way? Partitioning is not something I know a lot about.

Also, after running dd, I would have expected to be able to insert the sd card into my regular computer, and mount it like usual, but it doesn't work. mount fails, reporting "wrong fstype, bad option, bad superblock, missing codepage or other error."

Finally, on the beaglebone.org website, it says

To turn these images into eMMC flasher images, edit the /boot/uEnv.txt file on the Linux partition on the microSD card and remove the '#' on the line with 'cmdline=init=/opt/scripts/tools/eMMC/init-eMMC-flasher-v3.sh'. Enabling this will cause booting the microSD card to flash the eMMC.

I think I do want a flasher image since I am only booting off the sd card so that I can immediately copy the contents of the sd card to eMMC. This seems to imply that I should be able to mount the sd card so that I can edit this file.

[drewfustini]

It doesn't matter how the SD card is formatted before the dd.

I think there is a problem with the command you used:

dd if=bone*img of=/dev/sdb1

The "of=" parameter should be the entire block device, not just a partition. In this case, it should be /dev/sdb.

Here is a flasher image that you can try:
Flasher: (lxqt-4gb) (All BeagleBone Variants with a 4GB eMMC)

Direct link:
BBB-blank-debian-8.7-lxqt-4gb-armhf-2017-01-30-4gb.img.xz

After decompress with xz, the dd command for this image should be similar to (depending on the block device that represent your SD card):

dd if=BBB-blank-debian-8.7-lxqt-4gb-armhf-2017-01-30-4gb.img of=/dev/sdb

[rsfairman]

Doh! And I knew better, too. Improperly calibrated caffeine intake?

For anyone else reading this, you only have to hold down the button for a few seconds, ten at most, before the LEDs start to flash, and you can release the button.

The BBB booted up after a few minutes to the SD card. I then edited /etc/uEnv.txt as specified on beaglebone.org, and it flashed the eMMC in about 15 minutes. Everything now works as it should.

Thanks

[drewfustini]

Thanks for following up. Great to know that it worked!