Boot Jetson TK1 from SD Card when eMMC is not available

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson Systems Jetson TK1
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1

I’m working with a Jetson TK1 running L4T R21.5, and I’m currently facing an issue with the onboard eMMC (SDMMC4). The eMMC seems to have failed completely and is now inaccessible.

During flashing, I received the following error:

bootloader status: fatal failure to read/write to mass storage (code: 9)
message: nverror:0xa000e (0xa000e) Nv3pGetDeviceInfo 793 flags: 0

From my understanding, the BootROM on the TK1 platform expects to read the BCT and U-Boot from the eMMC (SDMMC4) during the early boot stages.

My Question:

Is there any way to boot the Jetson TK1 directly from the SD card (SDMMC3) instead of the onboard eMMC?

I would greatly appreciate any guidance, bootloader configuration tips, or hardware-level insights that could help me work around this issue without relying on the faulty eMMC.

3

No, I don’t think rel-21 ever implemented to do this. If eMMC is broken, then there is no method to truly boot it up.

4

I will add that Jetsons do not have an actual BIOS, and all of the equivalent is done in software. The TK1 puts this in eMMC partitions. Even if you could relocate the rootfs (o/s) partition to another device, then you’d still have problems booting without eMMC.

EDIT: In theory perhaps QSPI could be used for this purpose, but this is the part which I think had never been developed. The TK1 is the first Jetson from 32-bit CPU days, released in 2012. It wasn’t until L4T R32.x that this really got properly developed because then there were several models of Jetsons with eMMC and several models without eMMC.

5

thank you really appreciate it