If you want to avoid l-m-c which is the image creation route we support, once you've created the first master and have it booting and setup the way you want, and presuming all your SD cards are exactly the same, I suspect you'd fine more success to dd from master to create an image file and then dd from the image file to each successive SD card.
Regards, Tom
On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 5:18 PM, AJ ONeal coolaj86@gmail.com wrote:
Were you using Linaro-media-create to put things onto the SD card or some other route?
Yes. created the master card using `linaro-media-create` booted it once and added some secret sauce to it. duplicated that card to 20 cards using `sfdisk` and `partimage`. (Half of those cards did not boot) used `gparted` to create a new partition table on one of the failed cards (the new second master) used `rsync` to copy the contents of the first master to a second master reran the duplication process repeated the step above for the remaining failed cards ended up with 3 master cards with the exact same filesystem contents and very nearly identical partition tables, but different disk geometries (head, cyl, sector).
AJ ONeal
On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:48 PM, AJ ONeal coolaj86@gmail.com wrote:
I have a few inter-related issues:
Why would one kernel boot a card that another kernel can't? Why would a card's disk geometry matter for boot? Who is a good manufacturer for getting hardware-identical cards in bulk? How can I probe the actual "disk geometry" of an sd card?
I bought 100 Transcend SD cards a little while ago and duplicated them with an OpenEmbedded-based filesystem (linux-2.6.36). There were a few "bad" cards that I threw out, but the success rate was acceptable.
In the next round of 40 SD cards I used a Linaro-based filesystem (linux-2.6.39) and had about a 50% failure rate when testing that the cards would boot, which is absurd. There kernel reports: [ 1.003204] mmcblk0: unknown partition table However, the cards would mount and show files just fine. I reduplicated one of the non-booting cards with an OpenEmbedded filesystem and then it booted. Weird!
After some investigation I found that using `gparted` (instead of `fdisk`) to create a new partition table and then `rsync`ing the contents of the original filesystem resulted in a booting Linaro card. Rinse and repeat and I ended up with 3 images which only vary by the disk geometry as reported by `fdisk -l`:
50% -- 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 974 cylinders 40% -- 2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 1957632 cylinders 10% -- 247 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1022 cylinders 1 card still didn't boot
I'm lost. Please advise. AJ ONeal
Non-booting kernel message [ 0.923309] Waiting for root device /dev/mmcblk0p2... [ 0.957885] mmc0: host does not support reading read-only switch. assuming write-enable. [ 0.982025] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address b368 [ 0.988494] mmcblk0: mmc0:b368 USD 7.46 GiB [ 0.993957] mmcblk0: detected capacity change from 0 to 8018460672 [ 1.003204] mmcblk0: unknown partition table [ 1.036926] VFS: Cannot open root device "mmcblk0p2" or unknown-block(179,2) [ 1.044433] Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions: [ 1.053344] b300 7830528 mmcblk0 driver: mmcblk [ 1.058959] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)
Booting kernel message [ 1.122070] mmc0: host does not support reading read-only switch. assuming write-enable. [ 1.146087] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address b368 [ 1.152557] mmcblk0: mmc0:b368 USD 7.46 GiB [ 1.158020] mmcblk0: detected capacity change from 0 to 8018460672 [ 1.166351] mmcblk0: p1 p2 p3 [ 1.259674] EXT3-fs: barriers not enabled [ 1.265411] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds [ 1.271331] EXT3-fs (mmcblk0p2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode [ 1.278686] VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly on device 179:2. _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
-- Regards, Tom
"We want great men who, when fortune frowns will not be discouraged."
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