OMAP3 port troubleshooting guide

At the moment this is just a rather disorganised list of all the things I can think of that can (and have) gone wrong. So if anyone feels like trying to tidy up this page, please do so!

Nothing appears on the monitor when I turn on the machine

Unfortunately, this problem could be caused by any number of issues:

• It may be something simple:
  • Your SD card is not set up correctly
    • Apart from the obvious mistake of missing out a file or naming it wrong, there’s also the chance that your operating system is hiding the ‘true’ names of the files from you. E.g. on Windows if you have filename extensions hidden, you may have accidentally copied the boot script as ‘boot.scr.scr’ instead of just ‘boot.scr’.
  • Your monitor isn’t plugged in/turned on
  • The SD card isn’t properly seated in the SD card slot
  • You’re not using a suitable power supply for the board
  • Your monitor is set to the wrong input
  • The video mode is outside the scan range of your monitor [try typing f12*WimpMode 21 {ENTER} {ENTER} ]
• If you have a board which can boot from NAND (e.g. “classic” BeagleBoards, IGEP boards, DevKit8000’s, Pandoras) then:
  • There may be a problem with the NAND which is stopping u-boot from running
  • u-boot may not be configured to run the boot script which is on the SD card
• If you have a Beagleboard XM A2-01 (which can’t boot from NAND but has NAND present) then:
  • If you have used the ‘saveenv’ command some variables will be stored in NAND. Try ‘nand erase’ to recover to ‘as supplied’ status. Note XM ONLY.
• If you have a board which can’t boot from NAND (e.g. BeagleBoard-xM, TouchBook) then:
  • Your SD card might not have copies of x-loader (the ‘MLO’ file) or u-boot (‘u-boot.bin’) on it, or the files might be named wrong. [This can be eliminated if you have a Beagleboard XM by creating a fresh ‘validation image’ SD card, following the instructions here and adding the file ‘riscos’ to it and loading it manually.]
  • Your SD card might not be formatted correctly [Ditto]
• There may be a bug in RISC OS
  • Try disconnecting any USB devices and see if the machine boots now
  • Versions of the video driver (OMAPVideo) prior to 0.13 had a bug that sometimes caused the driver to fail – the machine would boot but the screen would remain off. It’s recommended that you upgrade to a newer ROM image (November 2011 or later) to fix the issue.
  • RISC OS may not work yet on the machine you’re using. Check the list of machines here to see if you’re using a known-compatible machine or not.

If you can’t find anything obviously wrong with your setup, and rebooting doesn’t make the issue go away, then you will most likely need to connect a serial cable from the board to another PC in order to determine why the board isn’t booting. If you’re unsure how to do this, just ask on the forums!