can't boot XO-1 from USB, doc needed

[James Cameron]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 02:05:10PM -0800, S Page wrote:
> I wrote:
> >> I'd like to boot off USB and look at my XO-1's NAND filesystem. But
> >> the wiki instructions for booting off USB[1] were out of date.
> 
> I still can't boot 11.3.0 from USB following
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_USB_disks#Booting.

Honestly, I'm not surprised, I haven't heard of anyone having easy
success with this method, and I don't think it was part of the 11.3.0
release testing.  However, your finding below might suggest that the
problem is USB drive related.

> James Cameron helpfully replied:
> > I would use http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tiny_Core_Linux to boot from USB
> > and investigate the cause:
> 
> That worked using boot u:\boot\olpc.fth , very nice!

It should have worked without using that command.  That it doesn't
suggests you have a USB drive that does not work correctly with
OpenFirmware, or a USB host fault.  You might explore this by upgrading
to Q2F05 and testing boot from USB without typing any commands.  Be sure
to insert the USB drive before turning on the laptop.  You might also
try a different USB drive.

> at which point after about 15 seconds I get
>  JFFS2 error: (1053) jffs2_build_inode_pass1: child dir "root" (ino
> #340448) of dir ino #340447 appears to be a hard link

Well, that's consistent with your mail of 7th November, which contained
the same error.  It suggests filesystem corruption in the JFFS2 on NAND
Flash.

> Yet the NAND flash contents look pretty good, /home/olpc, /versions,
> etc.  `find -inum 340xxx` fails to find those inode numbers, but
> prints
>   find: ./versions/run/af5b6blahblah: Input/output error
> `ls` reports this directory doesn't exist. Unfortunately there's no
> fsck.jffs2 , so this seems irreparable. I hope it's just hardware
> rather than the "steps to free up disk space" that I vaguely recall
> running before I last shut down.

The way to find out is to repeat those steps after reinstall.  If they
break it again, you've learned that the steps might need refinement.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/