Trouble booting from eMMC

MNT Reform
1

I am running nicely with at the moment with a build of v3 booting off of the SD card and running off of NVME. I have flashed the eMMC with the system rescue image and both partitions when mounted appear to have all the required files to function but when flip the dip switch under the heat sink and attempt to boot from the eMMC I only get a black screen. I would really like to boot from eMMC and run off of NVME and skip the SD card. Anybody else encounter this issue? Any thoughts on how I might troubleshoot?

Thanks in advance.

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Two ideas on how to proceede.

The first one being, that you create an SD card with only the bootloader but no kernel or OS on it. Then boot from that SD card. The bootloader will attempt to load the kernel and so on from eMMC. That way you can easily find out wether it is the bootloader that is the issue or something else. If you don’t know how to do that, you can create a second SD card with the v3 image and then simply delete the kernel and initrd and so on from it.

The second idea is to connect a serial cable and see what happens at bootup…

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Thanks for the suggestions. I will give them a try and see what I can figure out. I’m entirely black screen on boot this morning, even with the SD card in, so it’s currently just a pretty piece of sculpture. It was fine last night when I shut it down but this morning I can’t get anything but the menu LED.

Adventure, thy name is Open Source. :slight_smile:

Update: Corrupted SD card. Boots fine from my v2 card. Weird.

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I recently attempted booting off of eMMC with sysimage-v3 as well. Turns out that there are some missing tweaks necessary for reform-boot-config before this can work without any manual adjustments. In the process I also extended the reform-flash-rescue script to allow easy updating of u-boot and installation of sysimage-v3 on eMMC. You can try it out yourself with the changes from this merge request: reform-flash-rescue (!14) · Merge requests · Reform / MNT Reform Tools · GitLab

With that, configuring eMMC boot with sysimage-v3 is as simple as flashing the image to the SD-Card, booting from it and then running:

reform-flash-rescue
# answer "y" twice
reform-boot-config --emmc nvme
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