Hey guys,

I learned the hard way never to buy a dev board without first looking at its resources to make sure they have adequate documentation and support.

All that aside, I was hoping someone would be able to help me flash the NAND on the board. There are a couple avenues that I have taken, but I've gotten stuck right before completion each time. I have an image to flash, and access to the board via my 32-bit Linux PC.

The board that I have is the Olimex A13-OLinuXino-WiFi.

Here's the different methods I've attempted:

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Using ADB
This is what I'm most familiar with. The only place I'm stuck is finding out what block to flash the image to.

From what I've heard...

Code:


But, I have no clue if that applies to all A13's.

My assumption is to run the following code, but... that's what it is... an assumption. Anyone able to shed some light on this?

Code:

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Using LiveSuit
LiveSuit is the toolset that AllWinner released for their A1X SoCs... the problem is it seems like they only have a Windows or 64-bit Linux version. Since I'm only on 32-bit Linux, I obviously can't compile it. I've searched everywhere for a 32-bit version

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Using sunxi-tools
LiveSuit utilizes sunxi-tools to flash the board. However... I can't for the life of me find any documentation surrounding it or any type of process around how to flash the board. It's all a mystery. There are two tools that I have been told to look at: nand-part and fel*. nand-part is a tool to manage the NAND partitions, while fel is a tool for writing directly to the NAND (specifying blocks, start and size).

NAND Map Memory

Code:


Is it a safe assumption that these correspond with the blocks in /dev/block/?

As in, /dev/block/nanda = bootloader, /dev/block/nadab = env?

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Using awutil
A new one! AllWinner Utilities has a tool called `awflash` which is supposed to be comparable to LiveSuit and flashes using the same method. The only problem is I can't get it to compile.


Code:


Anyone able to help me out with any of these methods? You would think with four options there would be SOME sort of resource or documentation out there to help me out. But, you know...

Any help would be appreciated!

I finally got `awflash` to compile! Turned out none of my usb libs had usb_dev_handle in them. I had to use MacPorts to install libusb-legacy and that worked perfectly. After wrestling with the makefile a little bit to force it to see the library (lol) it finally built.

Hopefully I'll have more luck with `awflash` then I did with the other methods. Anyone have any insight in to this? If anyone has (or can find) any resources or documentation surrounding awflash, that'd be a huge help.

How many partitions do you have on the board? You asked on IRC about the partitions, and I see you wrote this:

'As in, /dev/block/nanda = bootloader, /dev/block/nadab = env? "


Code:


Here I have annotated this table with likely mappings:


Code:

Notice that the nandX's in order match the three you listed. It is highly probably that the partitions are lettered in physical layout order.

That's what I came to assume. The million dollar question is: What partition am I flashing? No one seems to be able to answer that question :S

fel from sunxi-tools has the following syntax:

Code:


awflash from awutils has the following syntax:

Code:


Obviously, I plug in the offset from the given partition (and in `fel`s case, the size of either the partition or the image as well). But... I have no clue which partition to flash. Unless I'm missing the boat all together and I really have no clue what I'm talking about when I say 'flash' (which don't think anyone including myself would rule our for a second).


Edit ftr

Code:


edit 2
ftr

Code:

Trying to also figure out why it's not booting in the first place. Figured I'd paste this stuff in here, ftr.

$ dmesg > dmesg.txt
$ logcat -d > logcat.txt
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo > cpuinfo.txt
$ getprop > prop.txt

Image to Flash: sun5i_android_a13-evb800x600_VGA_EN_SD.img

[edit]
Looks like this is where it is failing to boot:
Code:
Not sure what that means for me, though, except that I need to flash it. I have someone who is attempting to help me out, but he's using a different board (same soc)... not helping too much, though, seeing as he's flashing the SD and not the NAND :S

Does no one know how to flash that image to NAND without LiveSuit? >.>