Dennis Lee Bieber <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:45:03 +0000, Chris Green
> <[email protected]> declaimed the following:
>
> >I have a BBB (well, I have three actually) all running old versions of
> >Debian (Debian 7 to be specific). I need to update to the latest Debian.
> >
> One could ask "which 'Debian 7'?" My archive has image files for 7.8,
> 7.9, and 7.11.
>
It doesn't really matter does it, they're all going to be unsupported
quite soon.
>
> >So, I have written the latest Debian 9.3 image to a micro-SD card,
> >that was easy enough (though it would be nice if there were Linux how
> >to do it instructions on the basic BBB 'getting started' page).
> >
> >Now I'm confused. There seem to be conflicting instructions about
> >what to do next.
> >
> >First I simply put the new microSD card into my BBB and turned on, it
> >booted OK and I was able to ssh into it via ethernet but it was still
> >running the old OS, not the new one on te SD card.
> >
> As I recall, my original BBB (with an old version of Wheezy) required
> holding the boot button when applying power to get it to boot from SD card.
> Once I'd flashed a newer image to the BBB, it seems the newer u-Boot (while
> u-Boot loads from eMMC) would detect the SD card and complete the boot from
> said card.
>
> I'm really about a year behind in updating my units so this is from
> stale memory.
>
I think you're right but it's a pity this isn't all describd somewhere
as it's very confusing when one tries to do what the main BBB
documentation says and it doesn't work as described.
> >Searching a bit more there seem to be two ways to copy the OS to EMMC,
> >one involves holding a button down (but not clear which button) when
> >booting and the other involves editing /boot/uEnv.txt and rebooting.
> >However I'm still lost as to which works in my situation.
> >
> Early release images came in non-flasher and flasher images. A flasher
> image only required booting from the SD card to start flashing; and as
> mentioned above, that might require holding the boot button.
>
> For a few years now all stock images are provided as non-flasher.
> Booting from the SD card thereby /run/ using the SD card as the file
> system.
>
> For the last few images, I typically boot to SD card, make
> configuration changes (mostly: copy my home directory from eMMC to SD
> card), ensure it is working for me... THEN edit the uEnv.txt on the SD card
> and reboot to flash from card to eMMC.
>
> Remove SD card, reboot, verify it is okay. Install the SD card (do not
> reboot) and mount it (I recall one or two images about 2 years ago that
> would automount), reverse the uEnv.txt edit (returning the card to
> non-flasher), and then perform the procedure to repartition the card to
> make all the space available.
>
> With luck, once a modern image has been flashed, it will boot using
> the
> SD card IF the card is in place when power is applied -- without needing to
> hold the boot button.
>
> The other thing you'll encounter: Most documentation on device tree
> overlays and the capemanager will be out-of-date. Sometime during the
> Jessie images a conversion was made from having Linux load device tree
> overlays into having u-Boot load them before starting Linux. {And yes --
> I'd like to find better documentation for those too: so many books were
> written for capemanager overlays and there isn't a clean example of how to
> convert instructions from that era into the u-Boot overlay era}
>
> NOTE: this change from Linux to u-Boot device tree handling may also
> cause problems -- having u-Boot in eMMC that detects an SD card during boot
> might not run if the u-Boot assumed Linux loads the device tree, but the SD
> card image is one that expected the device tree to have loaded by u-Boot.
> Boot button needed to get the SD card u-Boot to load then...
>
Thanks for all this. I seem to have got to where I want to be now but
I'd be surprised if there aren't a few more hiccoughs. :-)
--
Chris Green
ยท
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