[olpc-help] Bood failed on attempted upgrade from 650 to 767

Richard A. Smith richard at laptop.org
Tue Dec 2 02:00:14 EST 2008


Tom Harries wrote:

> Downloaded and placed on flash drive os767.img and fs.zip. Inserted 
> flash drive XO off. Held 4 game keys and turned on. Released as instructed.
> First screen comes up and dissapears. Then second screen with 3 icons 
> appears.
> Then the following:
> "Trying nand: \boot-alt\bootfs.zip"
> "Trying nand: \boot-alt\runos.zip"
> "Boot failed"
> turn off using power button.

I've seen this before.  I seem to remember that it was an issue with 
open firmware not liking the USB flash drive.  My first suggestion is to 
try a different USB flash drive. Or if you have an SD card to try and 
put the files on that.

> I also tried installing gg-767-4.img, with same results.
> I was careful to keep the "fs.zip" files correlated.

You probably want to use this image anyway since it has the G1G1 
activity pack pre-installed.

> Whether this is related or not I don't know, but when I tried to refresh 
> the original os via the "o" gamepad key turnon, it also failed.

If you have never upgraded the OS via olpc-update then there is not a 
previous copy to go back to.   This is also the case after you have 
(sucessfully) done a "clean" install via the secure reflash like you are 
currently trying do to with 767 (aka 8.2-767)  Only the pristine files 
exist until you use olpc-update to update the OS.

> Suggestions on how to get past this are much appreciated.
> I have no knowledge of linux.

We have a few options:

1) Is to just try a different USB flash drive.  The vast majority of odd 
problems like this during reflash are the result of flaky USB drive. 
Sadly many manufacturers don't adhere to the USB specification close 
enough.  Both Windows and Linux have _lots_ of extra stuff in them to 
try and make these drives work right.  Adding the same level of support 
  into our firmware is a huge effort for not much gain and requires lots 
and lots of testing.  We do try and add fixes for problems that we find 
when we have a good test case.

Certainly you should try the above first.

1a) Reformat your USB flash drive and try again. (Some of the issues 
from 1 are not hardware but subtle issues with the formatting on the USB 
drives.

1b) If you do have the same problem with multiple drives then its 
possible your donwnload has problems.  If you used Windows and IE for 
the download we've had many reports of the files being corrupted. Using 
Firefox or Linux for the download normally fixes this.
We can use the existing build on the laptop to verify that the files on 
your USB flash drive are not corrupted.  But it will involve a little 
bit of command line work.  Nothing too complicated though.

2) Try the same via an SD card. Follow the same instructions but copy 
the files onto an SD card rather than USB flash drive.

3) Upgrade your firmware then retry. If you don't have another USB or SD 
card large enough for the image then we can try to just put a firmware 
upgrade onto smaller devices and update your firmware.  Since build 650 
we have added many USB fixes to the firmware and its much more tolerant 
of marginal USB disks.  Plus its a bit better at trying to tell you 
whats gone wrong.

4) use olpc-update.  Can your XO currently get on the internet?  If so 
then we can try to net upgrade.

5) Get a developer key and we can debug the problem.  This will require 
1 of the 3 methods of getting data onto the XO to work.  Either via 
network, USB or SD.  Plus a good bit of technical work.

-- 
Richard Smith  <richard at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child


More information about the community-support mailing list