I use a raspbian OS to prepare the sd card. Initially I used
dd if=openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-sdcard.img of=/dev/sda1 BS=10M after having prepared the sdcard as /dev/sda with one partition.
As this didn’t work I downloaded bpi-tools and use bpi-copy (but noticed it is essentially doing the same thing with dd)
The output from bpi-copy is:
# bpi-copy openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-sdcard.img /dev/sda1
SRC=openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-sdcard.img
DST=/dev/sda1
COPYMODE=imagetodisk
imagetodisk
bpi-copy(v1.3.4(github)), bananapi image & disk tools
[ snipped ]
Warning: Try to write openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-sdcard.img to BOOTDISK /dev/sda1
==============================================================
Thu 24 Oct 20:33:30 AEDT 2024
*** start COPY (blue led on ) .....
umount device: /dev/sda1
==============================================================
IMGFILE=openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-sdcard.img
==============================================================
img
7+1 records in
7+1 records out
78643204 bytes (79 MB, 75 MiB) copied, 0.481122 s, 163 MB/s
75.0MiB 0:00:00 [ 156MiB/s] [ <=> ]
0+1201 records in
0+1201 records out
*** end COPY (blue led off) .....
Thu 24 Oct 20:33:38 AEDT 2024
==============================================================
RUNTIME 0:8
OK!! You can remove the BOOTDISK /dev/sda1 now!!
When I put the SDcard into the R3 and with the switches all in the up position and power on, all I get is a row of question marks and nothing else.
Apologies for the output of the command text being in bold bigger text as well as other formatting changes I didn’t intend or request. I don’t (yet) know to stop that happening.
You can format the outputs as code by selecting it and using Code-Button (<>). You should be able to edit your messages.
To the original problem…you can try more recent images. Either debian/ubuntu from me or mainline openwrt.
Make sure you flash uncompressed image (img) and card is inserted correctly. The lines you see is bootrom which does not find bootloader (bl2) from selected bootdevice (dip switches).
Thanks very much for your help so far Frank.
I have struggled with the dip switches settings so have made a bit but not a lot of progress. Looking at the top of the card where one can see the RJ45 ports and the SFP and the GPIO pins I think that when the dip switches are in the raised position that means zero, or high. while in the lowered position they are 1 or low. For example the eMMC boot setting is high (0), low (1), high(0), high(0).
Anyhow, I cannot get any SD card install to boot. I bought a new card, partitioned, and used dd to copy the openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-sdcard.img image to it. When I have the dip switches set to low, low, low, low it produces this output:
SF: Detected w25q256 with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 32 MiB
Reading from 0x180000 to 0x46000000, size 0x100 ... OK
Reading from 0x180000 to 0x46000000, size 0x1b98080 ... OK
## Loading kernel from FIT Image at 46000000 ...
Using 'config-1' configuration
Trying 'kernel-1' kernel subimage
Description: ARM64 OpenWrt Linux-5.4.171
Type: Kernel Image
Compression: lzma compressed
Data Start: 0x460000e8
Data Size: 28910373 Bytes = 27.6 MiB
Architecture: AArch64
OS: Linux
Load Address: 0x48080000
Entry Point: 0x48080000
Hash algo: crc32
Hash value: 04231e6a
Hash algo: sha1
Hash value: c1b633d7ba137a6b22cbe0dee22b68bb086bf3e5
Verifying Hash Integrity ... crc32 error!
Bad hash value for 'hash-1' hash node in 'kernel-1' image node
Bad Data Hash
ERROR: can't get kernel image!
MT7986>
why won't the SDcard image boot?
When I have the switches set to eMMC - high, low, high, high the machine boots a version of openWRT that I did not knowingly install. My best guess is it was already there. Otherwise I am at a complete loss as to how it was ever copied there. The openWRT initial screen says openWRT 21.02 - SNAPSHOT This is very confusing.
within U-Boot can I erase eMMC? How?
While it was working why does the disk page command show a few MB of storage, when the eMMC is advertised as 8GB?
How can I make use of the whole 8GB?
But for now I need to solve the issue of booting from the SDcard image so I can proceed to copy to NAND and then to eMMC as per the original instructions.
Many thanks.
LR.
PS the strange formatting of bold and coloured words, seemingly random is not something I did and am yet to understand why it happened. So apologies again for that.
All up (1/high) should be sdcard on R3 (R4 is down=high,so both down).
So i guess you are booting the vendor image from emmc,not the one from your sdcard.
For sdcard,there is a spring mechanism,not only put card in till resistance,the card has to be locked against the spring.
Using full 8gb of emmc with openwrt is tricky as for sysupgrade the main partition was smaller to avoid data loss. Afaik you can add additional partition. Resizing the existing can lead to non functional sysupgrade
Thank you for all the help, it’s been great (and apologies for the delay in updating).
I’ve clarified the dip switch positions and now clear on the settings.
I solved the SDcard boot problem. It was due to a silly mistake I made and am embarrassed about it. When I used dd to write the image to the card I partitioned the card first. So I wasn’t writing to the raw block device but at some offset dictated by the partitioning. That is, dd if= of=/dev/sda1
When I realised, I deleted the partition and used dd if= of=/dev/sda and it worked perfectly. I tried this on additional cards and all booted the R3 without problem.
Subsequent install steps of then copying the image to NAND, booting from there, installing to eMMC and booting from there all worked fine.
Due to another thread, in which you also helped, I found the missing wireless interfaces were due to some contention between the TTL and the wireless circuits, so as per that thread booting with the serial disconnected solved that and it’s been fine since.