Raspberry Pi Forums

Dear fellows,

This is the experience I would like to share with you, after 2 weeks of Raspberry Pi testing, with hue entusiasm - and frustration as well.

To make the story short: writing images with Raspbian Wheezy and OpenElec were successfull operations, while it failed constantly with Bodhi Linux.

- The issue does not come from the writer: it failed always on Bodhi, never on Raspbian or OpenElec.
- The issue does not come from the SD cards: I use a set of 3, all failed with Bodhi, all succeeded with Raspbian and OpenElec.
- The issue does not come from the method: I used Win32 Image Writer on Windows 7 and DD command line under Linux. Both methods always succeeded with Raspbian and OpenElec, and always failed with Bodhi.

The conclusion is quite clear: the issue must come from the IMG file from Bodhi. But strangely, nobody seems to complain about this, according to a search through dedicated forums... The downloaded file was not corrupted (MD5 check), though, and the writing process always ended up with a success notification from Image Writer and DD.

I realized that the VFAT partition witten on the SDE card was flagged only as LBA - not BOOT. Changing this with GParted had no effect.

Is it possible that the issue could come from the files used for the creation of VFAT partition (kernel.img, start.elf, etc.)? Maybe that Bodhi was correct by the time of the creation of the image found for Raspberry Pi on their website, but that it's not compatible anymore with the Raspberry Pi bought 2 weeks ago (change in the firmware, something like that)?

Comparing the 3 VFAT partitions of the 3 systems written on SD cards shows that kernel.img is the only similar file (same size exactly). All others are different.

Does anybody encounter identical issues when testing several systems, and have an idea for a solution?

Thanks for your feedback

Hi yvesgxnk!

So where did you download that image from? You’ll probably have more success contacting them directly since the Bodhi image isn’t maintained by the Raspberry Pi foundation.

If its using an old kernel, it won't work with newer Pis with Hynix memory chips. Probably no-one has complained becasue few will use Bodhi linux with the Pi.

What you could try is copy the files from a current Raspbian boot partition to the Bhodi boot partition.

Gr.
Dirk.

Hi Dave and Pluggy,

Well, the image was of course downloaded on Bodhi's website.
But I didn't contact them because their forum shows a very basic approach to issues... And, as Pluggy says, there are not so many people who use Bodhi with RPi.
Additionnally, without being an expert, I suspect that the issue is simply linked to the way the RPi works, loading one file after another in a defined order, reading them from the VFAT partition. Bodhi itself is not involved - maybe only the files they included in their RPi build.
My RPi starts (red light up), then the green light gets up for 2 or 3 seconds, then... nothing else happens. This is in fact a problem encountered with other images (Raspbian Pisces, Chameleon).
So, I wonder is it would be a good idea to write a SD card with the system I'd like to test, mount the VFAT and replace most files (start.elf, bootcode.bin and start.elf at the minimum) by the one that work from Raspbian or OpenElec...?

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3534

512 Mbyte RPis with a Hynix memory chip need need a very recent firmware.

So, I wonder is it would be a good idea to write a SD card with the system I'd like to test, mount the VFAT and replace most files (start.elf, bootcode.bin and start.elf at the minimum) by the one that work from Raspbian or OpenElec...?

that's what I was suggesting. I would copy all the binaries (.elf, .bin, .img and .dat), in effect only leaving config.txt and cmdline.txt

Gr.
Dirk.

It is certainly worth trying replacing the start.elf and bootcode.bin with ones from a current Raspbian image. [edit]I'd leave the *.img files as they are, as they will probably be specific to Bodhi and would cause problems if they didn't match the modules on the Linux partition [/edit]

BTW the "boot" flag is meaningless on most Linux systems, and especially so on the Pi. It always boots from the first FAT/DOS partition on the card.

I have the same problem here (board with hynix processor), replacing the start.elf and bootcode.bin does not solve it for me.

yvesgxnk is it working for you?

Regards