On an Olimex Lime2 NAND 4GB I installed Armbian legacy debian jessie server on an sd-card.

 "lime2 3.4.112-sun7i #10 SMP PREEMPT Sun Oct 23 15:49:51 CEST 2016 armv7l"

 

I followed:

 https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-install-to-emmc-nand-sata-usb

 

and after reboot without card, it did not boot: (from serial console)

[...]
[       0.366] flash init finish
[       0.367] mbr magic  is not correct
[...]

Anyhow I didnt understand as prerequisits in description:

 

 "pre-installed system on NAND (stock Android or other Linux)"

 

I erased the nand before, since I used it otherwise:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nand bs=512 count=16

 

Question: Is my NAND broken or must I install some mbr before in the nand ?

Any advice ?

 

 

mfg winfried

 

Appendix: complete boot output:

HELLO! BOOT0 is starting!
boot0 version : 2.0.0�
read dram para.
dram driver version: 1.15
dram size =1024MB
0x00018608
super_standby_flag = 0
Succeed in opening nand flash.
block from 2 to 6
deal block 2
Succeed in reading Boot1 file head.
The size of Boot1 is 0x00068000.
The file stored in 0x00000000 of block 2 is perfect.
Check is correct.
Ready to disable icache.
Succeed in loading Boot1.
Jump to Boot1.
[       0.159] boot1 version : 2.0.0
[       0.159] script installed early ok
[       0.160] pmu type = 3
[       0.265] bat vol = 942 mv
[       0.278] axi:ahb:apb=4:2:2
[       0.278] set dcdc2=1400mv, clock=912M successed
[       0.281] key
[       0.293] no key found
[       0.293] flash init start
[       0.293] NB1 : enter NFB_Init
[       0.296] NB1 : enter phy init
[       0.299] [NAND] nand driver(A20) version: 0x0x00000002, 0x0x00000012, data: 0x426fff64 1111692733
[       0.308] set retry default value: [       0.311]  0x00000020[       0.314]  0x00000020[       0.316]  0x00000073[       0.318]  0x000000c1[       0.321]
[       0.322] get the good blk ratio from hwscan : 870
[       0.327] NB1 : nand phy init ok
[       0.366] NB1 : init ok
[       0.366] flash init finish
[       0.367] mbr magic  is not correct
[       0.370] fs init fail
[       0.372] fs init fail, jump to fel
[       0.376] set retry default value: [       0.380]  0x00000020[       0.382]  0x00000020[       0.384]  0x00000073[       0.386]  0x000000c1[       0.389]
[       0.390] [NAND]dumy read,chip 0x00000000

NAND install part is a bit dirty since we can't write early boot binaries within Linux. You need to use proprietary Phoenix tools to write some stock Android / Debian and than we can make use of that. That's why we simply write:  "pre-installed system on NAND (stock Android or other Linux)"

 

Next problem is u-boot which is also some very old one from Allwinner, which has NAND support. Modern mainline u-boot does not have it and development in this area hasn't come to end user level yet.

 

On the top of that I would need to double check if this could be related to our install tools. I know they were broken at certain point and I am only sure that those self build are working o.k.

Thanks,

 

I tried now flash with orginal Olimex sdcard image (kernel 3.4.103) [1] and used the nandinstall script there and it worked.

 

I will look further in next days maybe to format nand properly for armbian to get the right "mbr magic" und update this comment to this topic

 

[1] https://www.olimex.com/wiki/images/2/20/A20-lime2_mainline_uboot_sunxi_kernel_3.4.103_jessie_emmc_rel_9.torrent

Steven made most progress on this:

https://github.com/phelum/CT_NandBoot (on lime2 is exactly the same)

 

I think the issue here is with our installer which should be fixable with updating to daily build. I will try a test install ASAP.