O2 Joggler Forum

roobarb! wrote:Every now and again, somebody posts that their Joggler isn't working and they ponder whether they should chuck it out.

NEVER BIN A JOGGLER

Fair enough.

My Joggler seems to be unable to boot from the internal flash (I can't remember what's on the internal flash as it's been a while). The O2 logo shows and then it just goes black like its attempted to boot something but frozen in the process.

I thought I'd try the reflasher - but that doesn't boot. Tried two known good USB pens that *can* boot things on this Joggler (other than the reflasher it seems) on both the external USB port and the internal one. Even tried the fs0 (fs0, fs1, up to fs4) trick by having a USB keyboard plugged into whichever USB port I wasn't using out of the 2 the Joggler has.

What does appear to boot off a USB pen though is Mint 12.04 - but X.Org (the graphics) don't start, so you have to Ctrl+Alt+F1 over to a console. If I look in /dev/ I can't find a mmcblk0 - so it looks like the internal flash might be dead, but that doesn't explain why the graphics don't start.

Additionally I tried to boot Android 4.4 (http://www.familie-kirchhofer.de/android/index.htm) off a USB pen as well. The word 'A N D R O I D' appears in ordinary text, but then immediately dumps you to a busybox shell.

I don't care about WiFi - so I was thinking of leaving my 4GB USB pen inside the unit (without the case plastic on it so nothing melts) and it can boot Android every time that way.

Any thoughts?

Steven

If things start to a degree, then look for the logs or enable some logging/debugging feature and have a look at those. This may shed some light, but may be a complete red herring. But would be good if you could let us all know. Jogglers are ageing now so I think more and more issues will be reported with regard to internal flash.

As I see it the options you have are (In order of severity) :

1/ Manual recreation of the internal flash, as you say the reflashing tool does not work for you - you need to search here for the details and be aware that there are issues with doing that. I recall that it may be necessary to wipe the mbr and partitions on the internal flash, and there may be other tricks too. All the knowledge is here. I've never done it so all I know is what I've discovered here.

2/ Reflash your EFI chip. Search for instructions here. Again, never done this, and I think there are things to be careful of and some tricks too.

3/ Work with what you have got or find a broken joggler and hack something together that works. If you've got the capability, it should be possible to replace the on-board flash with a replacement, and I think it is even possible to increase the size.

It would be useful to have the source code or a disassembly of what happen from when the Joggler is powered on to when control is actually passed to what is on a flash drive in the USB port. We'd learn a lot from that.

Another option is nothing works, maybe , is to consider using SeaBIOS that Inaxeon produced over a year ago. That may do things in a different way so you can get a usable Joggler. Again not done this, and all knowledge is in the forum. Be nice to have the source code for this too...

HTH, but I'm afraid I am not stating this based on actual experience. Maybe it will give you some pointers to something that is useful.

Very strange that the reflash system wouldn't work. Try more USB sticks; I've had the system fire up on Jogglers where the internal mmc also appears to be missing.

Juggler wrote:As I see it the options you have are

Thanks I'll investigate those options.

roobarb! wrote:Very strange that the reflash system wouldn't work. Try more USB sticks; I've had the system fire up on Jogglers where the internal mmc also appears to be missing.

Well the two I've got I know work to boot other stuff (Android and Mint) and have previously worked to boot the reflasher too. Any chance I can use your reflasher from Mint somehow? Or is it just dd'ing from the img.gz to mmcblk0 ? in which case mmcblk0 is missing in /dev anyway!

Steven

It is basically just a big wrapper for dd, so no, good point- it wouldn't do much for you!