RE: [Balloon] More Newbie Balloon questions...

>
> Another Newbie question....
>
> Well, got the thing to boot linux eventually (after much cursing, and
> waiting the absolute age it takes to do nand erasechip)
>
It does take a while and is chip size dependant.

> Now I'm puzzled as to what the root password of the "shipped" images
> should be. Perhaps I've missed this in a faq somewhere, but if anyone
> knows it off hand it would be helpful.
>
"rootme" is the root password as per all the familiar distros.

> Also, I had some concerns about the boot messages....
>
> Is the following normal (Snip from boot messages)
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> nand0_boot_size is 0
> Initialising Balloon NAND MTD devices.
> NAND device: Manufacture ID: 0xec, Chip ID: 0x76 (Samsung K9D1208V0M)
> Creating 2 MTD partitions on "Samsung K9D1208V0M":
> 0x00000000-0x00100000 : "nand boot"
> mtd: Giving out device 1 to nand boot
> 0x00100000-0x02000000 : "nand root"
> mtd: Giving out device 2 to nand root
> Initialising of First Balloon NAND MTD was successful.
> No NAND device found!!!
> Unable to find second Balloon NAND device.
> _____________________________________________________________
>
> (Not finding a second Nand device - is this because there is no
> Smartmedia card - or socket even - installed?)
>
Yes. That is exactly the point.

> and
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> Setting up RAMFS, please wait...
> nand_write_oob: Failed write, page 0x0000400d
> nand_write_oob: Failed write, page 0x0000400e
> depmod: /lib/modules/2.4.19-rmk4-tcl2-b1-james/modules.ieee1394map is
> not an ELedepmod: error reading ELF header /lib/modules/2.4.19-rmk4-
> tcl2-b1-james/modulesynand_write_oob: Failed write, page 0x00004057
> nand_write_oob: Failed write, page 0x000040ae
> nand_write_oob: Failed write, page 0x000040af
> depmod: /lib/modules/2.4.19-rmk4-tcl2-b1-james/modules.ieee1394map is
> not an ELedepmod: error reading ELF header /lib/modules/2.4.19-rmk4-
> tcl2-b1-james/modulesynand_write_oob: Failed write, page 0x0000404f
> _____________________________________________________________
>
>
> (which concerned me more, with the "Failed write"... bits)
>
That is far more serious. It means that either the nand chip has new bad sectors or that there has been a non-yaffs write to the oob. Nand chips to get crumbly and yaffs is designed to cope with that.

There have been issues with a mismatch between the bootldr and kernel definitions of wat is nice oob handling. The new bootldr/kernel combinations on the Husaberg server have elimiated all those woes.

Best wishes

Nick Bane
>
> Thanks
>
> Peter Clifton
>
>