UEFI won't boot from eMMC after update to exlinux.conf

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson AGX Orin
1

I had a working system to which I installed an updated kernel, modules, dtb and a camera dtbo. I then updated an entry in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf to point to these new files, ran “sync; sudo reboot”, but the system would not come back up. As I was remote at the time I was not able to capture a log of the first boot, but subsequent boots do not give the option to boot from any of the extlinux profiles on the eMMC, the Orin boots straight to the recovery partition.

Even if the new profile (which was the default) was broken somehow (it was not, the same files boot just fine on another unit) I don’t understand how this would keep us from booting ANY other profile on the eMMC. UEFI does not report any problems with the eMMC device, it just silently skips to booting the recovery partition.

From the UEFI shell I can inspect the partition table of on the eMMC device and it seems to be fine. I thought that perhaps the bootable partition on the eMMC was corrupt and I could fix it from the recovery partition, but it doesn’t have fsck, so that’s out.

Is there some way to recover this device short of reflashing it entirely?

3

I’m sorry, I don’t understand how this has anything to do with my problem.

5

Hi jeff.hildebrand,

There may be some errors before it enters into recovery partition.
If you have the serial console log at that moment, please share them for further check.

It seems your boot issue relating to the new kernel image/device tree you built.

As a result, I would suggest you updating them back to original kernel image/dtb if you can still enter into recovery image. You can simply mount the rootfs partition of eMMC to perform these works.