n800 mmc boot freezes!
 

hey guys,

I have had a lot of bad experience with booting from the internal flash on my n800. First of all, I was unable to mount a 1Gb card to install the OS there.

But after this, I have "successfully" booted from 3 different 2GB SD cards.
Here is the problem: right after install, everything works perfectly. After some tine (~week), the mmc boot starts to bug (ex: system freezes, the LED starts flashing followed by either an automatic or a manual reboot).
Last time (~1 day ago), on the 3rd SD that I've tried, the system completely refused to boot from mmc2, and started booting from flash.
I was able to fix it by rebuilding the partition table
# sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0
This did partially solve the problem: the OS was able to boot, yet it still continued to freeze from time to time.

1 - does anyone know what might be the cause of this problem?
2 - does anyone know how to fix it?
3 - is there a utility (for ANY OS) to verify that the SD isn't corrupted?

thank you

Ilia

Re: n800 mmc boot freezes!
 

Well, using USB storage functionality like this
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...522#post152522
can be one reason. Otherwise I don't know (except of course hardware fault).
You may check kernel log occasionally via dmesg command and search for mmc I/O errors. You may also boot from flash and run 'e2fsck /dev/mmcblk0p2' as root and see what errors it reports and try to let it fix it.

Re: n800 mmc boot freezes!
 

this is incredible.

the card became unreadable again, but this time, it's even more interesting:
# sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0
Checking that no-one is using this disk right now...
BLKRRPART: Input/output error
OK

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 61284 cylinders, 4 heads, 16 sectors/track
read: Input/output error

sfdisk: read error on /dev/mmcblk0 - cannot read sector 0
/dev/mmcblk0: unercognized partition table type
Old situation:
No partitions found
Input the following format; absent fields get a default value.
<start> <size> <type [E,S,L,X,hex]> <bootable [-,*]> ...(there was the rest of the default stuff... won't retype)

/dev/mmcblk0p1 :,,06
/dev/mmcblk0p1 0+ 61247 61248- 1959935+ 6 FAT 16
the other partitions were empty; I am skipping up until the prompt if I want to write the desired partition table, and the warning that no partition is marked as bootable. now comes the "fun" part:

read: Input/output error
sfdisk: read error on /dev/mmcblk0 - cannot read sector 0
Re-reading the partition table ...
BLKRRPART: Input/output error

now i try:
# mkdosfs /dev/mmcblk0p1
mkdosfs 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
/dev/mmcblk0p1: no such file or directory
#

now, I try to do this on a windows computer;
using windows XP, I try both fat and fat32, on both the quick format and without it, the answer is always the same:
"windows was unable to complete the format."

On a mac computer (Panther), the result was the same when trying to create a partition with free space.


Is this card (the 3rd one I try...) completely destroyed, or is there a chance of restoring it?

note: yeah... i know that returning o the shop and saying that it doesn't work anymore is an option, but i'm looking for something constructive.

Thanks

Ilis

Re: n800 mmc boot freezes!
 

same problem here, except I think I borked it with a hacked kernel. anyone have ideas?