Flashing SD for NX

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Xavier NX
#1

I have a photon carrier board from connect tech with an NX. I’ve been trying to flash to SD card for the last week but, as soon as I power cycle after a seemingly successful install. the system doesnt come back up.

I have attached a log of the first and second boot up to see if there are any clues. One major issue is it says there is no SD for some reason.

first and second boot.txt (94.9 KB)

ConnectTech have supplied a Board Service Pack which has been installed in the Linux_for_tegra which all worked fine when i was previously using the built in nx memory.

I have tried two different SD cards and formated it as ext4 mostly but sometimes ive tried Fat32. ConnectTech provide a script that should prepare things for booting from an external device. No errors were shown and I verified that the UUID was copied and that the rootfs folder structure was present on the SD and looked the same as that in Linux_for_tegra.

A couple other areas where I noticed something that might not be correct: After preparing the SD card, I noticed that I can mount it using mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/cti but the SD card is not seen. If I try and mount it using mount /dev/sdc /mnt/cti i get a wrongfs error. I can use disks or gparted and it mounts fine so I’m not sure if there is a problem there.

During the configuration process on the NX, i noticed that after the hardware configuration progress bar there is a copying build progress bar but this always remains at zero and is skipped. Perhaps because the SD card isn’t found?

I have seen on the forum that etcher should be used to copy and image onto the SD. However, presumably I shouldnt be loading the NX developer image if im using a custom carrier board?

#2

Do you mean cutting power? If not, then ignore this paragraph. If so, then some of the content from the session may be lost when the journal erases disk content which was not confirmed written. If the login session created the first boot account setup, then it is possible this or related content was lost due to improper shutdown (the odds are mostly that this would not happen if you did not immediately pull power after setup, but the odds are also not trivial it would happen). The correct shutdown (if on command line) would be “sudo shutdown -h now” (or “sudo shutdown -r now” if you wanted to reboot instead of halt).

Keep in mind that the eMMC models and the SD card models are different. The software and firmware will have different requirements based on the model, and so if you’re using software intended for an eMMC model with an SD card model, then there is some expectation of failure. So you might want to confirm if models are the same.

#3

Hi @linuxdev,

Thanks for helping out. Yes, as in cutting the power abruptly.

I tried your command but it still fails in the same way as before. I’ll ask the carrier board OEM if they have accounted for the difference in eMMMC vs SD. I’m sure they have but certainly something is not quite correct at the moment for it to keep failing.

In the log you will see that in both boot ups it reported that there is no SD present and “finding distribution to copy” never progresses past zero ( I presume is should ? “

#4

I don’t see enough in the logs to definitely point at a problem, but in some cases I wonder if the device tree is correct. You would need CTI’s device tree for all of the hardware to work.

I thought I’d comment on this particular part of your post:

It is rare that an SD card is formatted as a whole without any partitions. “/dev/sdc” is the device as a whole, while “/dev/sdc1” is a partition within the device. You can format entire SD cards without partitions, but just isn’t done much. The ability to mount “/dev/sdc1” says your card has partitions.

FYI, when asking about eMMC versus SD image, the hardware of an NX with eMMC is different than the hardware with just the SD card. The two are not interchangeable when it comes to images used. I would certainly expect boot failures if an SD image intended for a dev kit were used with an eMMC model, but if the SD is removed and not added until after boot of an eMMC model, then I would expect the SD could be mounted normally (a normal mount, and not use as boot media, but an SD present during boot could interfere with boot under some circumstances). Are you mixing purely SD card models and eMMC models (either software or hardware)?

Someone else may need to answer what follows since I have not used SD cards via etcher if you are not mixing eMMC and SD card models: Perhaps the SD card image has to be transferred to a partition as binary data, or to the SD as a whole (not a partition), or perhaps the SD card needs some sort of formatting prior to copying the SD image over. I suspect it is in that step that something went wrong if eMMC and SD models are not being mixed.

#5

It turned out to be an issue with the BSP for 4.4.1. Going back to Jetpack 4.4 resolved the issue. The OEM are looking into fixing what ever was wrong with 4.4.1 at their end.