Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

General discussion relating to the O2 Joggler, from the default O2 setup, to alternative operating systems and applications.
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roobarb!
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

BuZz wrote:
roobarb! wrote: Very odd. I wonder if the internal memory isn't ready in time for the EFI system? I could try the old hit-escape-a-lot trick to get into the EFI command line and see what happens.
have you swapped in a flash/efi chip from a working joggler ?
No, I haven't - but cbredfred has done and said it didn't make a difference.

Ah, now the source code for that fh module would come in handy! ;)
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by BuZz »

worth a try anyway.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

BuZz wrote:worth a try anyway.
Aye, I'll give it a shot tomorrow if I get time.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

roobarb! wrote:
BuZz wrote:worth a try anyway.
Aye, I'll give it a shot tomorrow if I get time.
Exactly the same. Whatever the issue is, it doesn't appear to lie with the EFI chip.

Now it gets weird. Of the three Jogglers I bought off eBay, all of them have the same issue (two O2, one OpenPeak). The flash memory seems to work fine (stores and recalls, no problems) but the Joggler just won't boot from it. All of them boot from USB devices with no trouble. :?
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by johnnygal »

I too got a recent job lot of 3 faulty jogglers from ebay with the same symptoms (one o2 and two openpeak).

I have tried reflashing with both your reflash tool and manually using dd with an image I made from a working joggler. Each time the flash/dd completed ok but would still not boot from internal flash.

One one occurrence though, after using the reflash tool on the o2 one, it did boot to the native os. Once I had configured the wireless settings, it automatically downloaded and installed an update from o2.

Once it restarted itself, it failed to boot again from internal flash and is back in the same state again.

For most of my jogglers I intend to use an OS other than the native one but for one joggler, I wanted to re-evaluate the native os as it might quite suit it's intended location/usage.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by gegs »

Would it be possible to configure GRUB (or whatever bootloader is used on a USB stick) to attempt to boot the stock OS?
Or is that what you mean by "All of them boot from USB devices with no trouble."
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

gegs wrote:Would it be possible to configure GRUB (or whatever bootloader is used on a USB stick) to attempt to boot the stock OS?
Or is that what you mean by "All of them boot from USB devices with no trouble."
What I mean there is that it will boot an alternative OS from the USB stick. I've not tried getting one to boot into the native system triggered by a stick. Might be the next thing to try.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by cbredfred »

This might be nothing, or even just confusion on my part, but back in the days of the old website/forum I posted
about the fact that the four mmcblk0pX's don't add up to the full amount of the reported size of the memory chip.
I think there was 8kbytes unaccounted for.
Could this have something to do with our problem?
Would it be possible to "image" the 1GB flash off a good joggler and write it to a "problem child"?
Also, when the "nvram" command is used, is that reading from the EFI chip?
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

cbredfred wrote:This might be nothing, or even just confusion on my part, but back in the days of the old website/forum I posted
about the fact that the four mmcblk0pX's don't add up to the full amount of the reported size of the memory chip.
I think there was 8kbytes unaccounted for.
Could this have something to do with our problem?
I don't know enough about the specifics, but I would have put this down to the way the partitions are laid out. It doesn't ring true to me as a potential problem though, especially if all Jogglers are the same.
cbredfred wrote:Would it be possible to "image" the 1GB flash off a good joggler and write it to a "problem child"?
Also, when the "nvram" command is used, is that reading from the EFI chip?
That's what the reflashing tool does, in a slightly more intelligent way. It behaves almost identically to OpenPeak's own upgrade procedure, copying the same data to partitions 2 and 3. Partition 4 is reconstructed from an image file I made and then the boot partition is rewritten from an image made with dd.

It would be possible to use dd to take a byte-for-byte copy of a Joggler and write it to another, but this wouldn't explain the failure of the device to boot from even a simple 'hand-made' boot area.

One thing to try - download the latest version of my reflashing tool, follow the instructions, but also include an empty file called 'repart' in the same directory as the jogglerflash script. This will force a recreation of the partitions before flashing. It hasn't worked for me, but who knows. You may be lucky!
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by cbredfred »

Any thoughts on the nvram command and where it is reading from?
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by spoyser »

Thought I would add my experience to thread.

About a week before Xmas the power to the house tripped (due to a dodgy aquarium pump), then whilst rebooting the power tripped again.

After this the Joggler would freeze on the (dull) Open Peak logo.

I tried the reflashing tool which seemed to work, however, on reboot again it stopped at the Open Peak logo.

I then read in this thread that sometimes it took more than one go to work, so I retried and on the 4th attempt it worked okay.

Great I thought that's my Joggler fixed, however on the next reboot once again it froze at the Open Peak logo. So once again I reflashed a few times and eventually it booted into Tango again, but once again on reboot it froze.

I repeated this cycle of reflashing a few times until it would boot into Tango, followed by freezing on reboot, until eventually it stopped booting from USB completely (I must have tried to reboot it 10-15 times, I also tried another USB stick with no success). Great I thought that's the end of my Joggler, time to stick it on ebay.

I never got round to sticking it on ebay and then yesterday (about 2 weeks since I last touched the Joggler), I came across the posting about connecting a keyboard and and constantly hitting escape followed by forcing a boot from USB.

Worth a shot I thought so armed only with a non-powered USB hub, and a wireless keyboard I gave it a whirl an lo and behold it actually reflashed successfully!!

However, on reboot once again it froze at the Open Peak logo, ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Not one to give up I tried reflashing again (this time without the hub and keyboard) and to my surprise it did actually boot from the USB and reflashed successfully, bear in mind that before the keyboard trick it had actually stopped booting from USB completely!!

This time on reboot it did successfully boot to Tango, and I have now rebooted it over 10 times and (touch wood) it seems okay, although I'm not going to count my chickens quite yet!
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by danfoshizzle »

spoyser wrote:Thought I would add my experience to thread.

About a week before Xmas the power to the house tripped (due to a dodgy aquarium pump), then whilst rebooting the power tripped again.

After this the Joggler would freeze on the (dull) Open Peak logo.

I tried the reflashing tool which seemed to work, however, on reboot again it stopped at the Open Peak logo.

I then read in this thread that sometimes it took more than one go to work, so I retried and on the 4th attempt it worked okay.

Great I thought that's my Joggler fixed, however on the next reboot once again it froze at the Open Peak logo. So once again I reflashed a few times and eventually it booted into Tango again, but once again on reboot it froze.

I repeated this cycle of reflashing a few times until it would boot into Tango, followed by freezing on reboot, until eventually it stopped booting from USB completely (I must have tried to reboot it 10-15 times, I also tried another USB stick with no success). Great I thought that's the end of my Joggler, time to stick it on ebay.

I never got round to sticking it on ebay and then yesterday (about 2 weeks since I last touched the Joggler), I came across the posting about connecting a keyboard and and constantly hitting escape followed by forcing a boot from USB.

Worth a shot I thought so armed only with a non-powered USB hub, and a wireless keyboard I gave it a whirl an lo and behold it actually reflashed successfully!!

However, on reboot once again it froze at the Open Peak logo, ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Not one to give up I tried reflashing again (this time without the hub and keyboard) and to my surprise it did actually boot from the USB and reflashed successfully, bear in mind that before the keyboard trick it had actually stopped booting from USB completely!!

This time on reboot it did successfully boot to Tango, and I have now rebooted it over 10 times and (touch wood) it seems okay, although I'm not going to count my chickens quite yet!
This has also happened to my openpeak joggler, I think it was around the seventh time that it successfully reflashed, took half an hour to boot afterwards too, I don't actually use Tango at all, but its nice to see the o2 screen if you have been playing with the efi, lets me know that the joggler is still alive lol,

Would also like to thank Roobarb! for all his work on the joggler, the reflash tool is a great tool in my arsenal, and Full-screen squeezeplayer in windows would not exist if he hadn't made the original Linux build.
Fullscreen squeezeplay windows, server 2003, foshiz mini v1 and v2, (and a few broken builds) :P so far.....
more to come!!

Jogglers " Obi Wan" according to Pete_c :D
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

cbredfred wrote:Any thoughts on the nvram command and where it is reading from?
Yes, I decided to read out those first 8192 bytes from /dev/mmcblk0 with dd - it's that area which the Joggler uses for it's NVRAM.

Again, interestingly, whatever I wrote into that area was stored properly - even though the Joggler still won't boot from the internal flash.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by cbredfred »

So if we weren't aware of that 8k of space can we assume that there might be other "things" (for want of better word) that we might not know?
If so, then I ask again, is it possible to image/copy the entire 1GB flash of a good joggler and transfer it to a stuck one?
I'm talking image at a low level that sees more granular than mmcblk's?
I understand that the reflashing tool works just like O2's update process and that would be ok if we were dealing with a corrupted mmcblk0pX, but this has to be something different.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by cbredfred »

Let's face it, if it's not the EFI chip and it's not the 1GB flash, then that only leaves a hardware problem and I'm guessing not many of us have the skill and test equipment to troubleshoot one of those, so I think that the flash memory needs well and truly eliminating from our inquires before we all have to accept that Tango is no more. :(
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

cbredfred wrote:So if we weren't aware of that 8k of space can we assume that there might be other "things" (for want of better word) that we might not know?
I don't doubt there are hardware unknowns in the Joggler. Only the hardware designers know the full story, but it's a device I think we are getting to understand pretty well now.
cbredfred wrote:If so, then I ask again, is it possible to image/copy the entire 1GB flash of a good joggler and transfer it to a stuck one?
I'm talking image at a low level that sees more granular than mmcblk's?
As I said, use dd to read out the complete contents of a working Joggler's mmcblk0 and then write it to the faulty one. There is no more basic level of access than delving into the contents of /dev.
cbredfred wrote:I understand that the reflashing tool works just like O2's update process and that would be ok if we were dealing with a corrupted mmcblk0pX, but this has to be something different.
It does look that way. In which case, toying with internal flash memory probably won't get us very far. :)
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by cbredfred »

roobarb! wrote:
cbredfred wrote:So if we weren't aware of that 8k of space can we assume that there might be other "things" (for want of better word) that we might not know?
I don't doubt there are hardware unknowns in the Joggler. Only the hardware designers know the full story, but it's a device I think we are getting to understand pretty well now.
Sorry, I thought judging by your earlier comments that you too were unaware of the 8k of missing critical memory space, but obviously it's just me.
So we have all of the software ruled out and must now accept that it is a hardware fault and that if Tango is required somebody much smarter than me is going to have to get it to boot from the USB.
Is that where we stand?
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by roobarb! »

cbredfred wrote:
roobarb! wrote:
cbredfred wrote:So if we weren't aware of that 8k of space can we assume that there might be other "things" (for want of better word) that we might not know?
I don't doubt there are hardware unknowns in the Joggler. Only the hardware designers know the full story, but it's a device I think we are getting to understand pretty well now.
Sorry, I thought judging by your earlier comments that you too were unaware of the 8k of missing critical memory space, but obviously it's just me.
No problem - I was aware that it was there, but had never taken the opportunity to check what it was really up to. A quick look at the output of...

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=something.img count=1 bs=8k
...and I was looking at the NVRAM config.
cbredfred wrote: So we have all of the software ruled out and must now accept that it is a hardware fault and that if Tango is required somebody much smarter than me is going to have to get it to boot from the USB.
Is that where we stand?
That would appear to be the case. I've just done a straight dd of /dev/mmcblk0 on a working Joggler and written it directly to /dev/mmcblk0 on the broken one. No change. Whatever the issue is, it is not to do with the content of the 1GB chip.

I would like to try a different EFI chip again, but I'm not in a position to do that at the moment.
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by cbredfred »

Can I bounce a few thoughts off you and see what I might learn or what ideas it might spark for yourself and others?
Please be patient with me because I'm no expert on this stuff, particularly Linux.
Please also feel free to correct me on anything that follows:

We are dealing with a 1GB flash memory chip that some piece of software makes look like a hard disk with 4 partitions on it so that the linux commands know how to speak/deal with it.
How many bytes in 1GB? 1073741824 bytes (not sure about that answer).
I've been trying to find information on the 1GB IC to answer that but keep hitting dead ends.
If the answer to that question is more than the size of mmcblk0 (1028128768 bytes) then is it possible that the firmware (EFI chip?) can access that "surplus" storage directly without the "I'm a disk drive" shell game?
If so, is that where our problem is?
I find it really hard to believe that there is a hardware fault and not some sort of corruption in the 1GB flash...or maybe I'm feeling optimistic today! :)

Also, how do they keep only 8192 bytes out of the partitions for NVRAM when a cylinder is 32768 bytes?
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Re: Reflashing Tool for the O2 Joggler

Post by BuZz »

it doesn't act like a harddisk. it is a block device supported by linux.

it isn't a 1gb ic. it is 2x 512mb flash chips - http://www.jogglerwiki.com/wiki/File:HiRes13.JPG

you can access the whole of the mmcblk0 device from linux.

there is no rule that a partition has to start at a 32kb offset, or that you have to read 32kb at a time etc.
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