USB Boot Problems

[MTCAT]

Hi everyone,

I'm still having problems building my second TinyCore logger, unfortunately...seemed like all was well but on final mechanical assembly I'm now having problems getting the system to boot up off the USB pen drive, various odd things happen during boot, boot process in general is unusually slow, most times it ends up hanging at the SYSLINUX prompt but I have seen some RAMDISK Incomplete write errors as well (with other spare boot pen drives that I was trying), so that was a new one for me.

I did get it to boot up, kind a sort of, a couple of times but had to use a different USB port, that seemed to help (pointing to a hardware issue?--> damaged USB port?), but even when it did seemingly boot up properly, as soon as I opened a terminal and typed "sudo microcom -s 9600 /dev/ttyACMO" to check on the temp sensor output, which looked okay, after hitting Ctrl-X to stop microcom, "ls -l" in the home directory would show no files, completely empty home directory???

Has anyone seen this "empty home directory" issue before?, and perhaps know its cause? Before starting microcom my home directory looked normal, but after stopping microcom, my home directory was empty.

I think I have two options?, I'm open to any other suggestions of course, but as I see it, I could try a new Vortex-DX3 board (would have to update and tweak all the BIOS settings though, argh!), or could maybe try to get TinyCore to boot up off the CF-card on the current DX-3 board instead?, not sure how hard the latter option would be to switch over too, Lubuntu 16.04 is also on the CF card right now..

I think I will also have to take apart my one working TinyCore logger (danger, danger), for the second (third?) time, and make more copies of it's boot pen drive since the other two copies I made previously are corrupted now I think.

Thanks, I appreciate the help/advice.

David

[MTCAT]

Update: I booted up Lubuntu and did verify that the USB temperature sensor works fine (ttyACM0), and a FAT32 pen drive is mountable and accessible just fine in the three other USB ports, so I don't know if it's a hardware issue after all??, running in circles, will try getting rid of those USB3.2 (but backwards compatible to 2.0 supposedly) SwissBit pen drives (trying to drawing too much current for USB2 ports?) and make a bunch of copies (CAREFULLY) of my one existing USB 2.0 Cactus drive on my recently obtained (x3) Cactus pen drives, and will see if that is progressive, sure hope so.

Thanks,

David

[MTCAT]

Hi everyone,

No luck with the newly cloned Cactus USB pen drive either, in terms of booting up, it makes it as far as the choice between the realtime and regular tinycore kernels, has a 10 second countdown where I can either choose the kernel myself or let it boot real time by default, after choice of kernel or at end of 10 second timer, goes no further and hangs, hope someone can help me make sense of this because I'm kind of lost here now, going in circles.

Thanks,

David

[MTCAT]

Hi everyone,

Update II - I did find that the "regular" Tinycore kernel will boot up on the ROVER with the newly cloned Cactus pen drive but suffers an error when trying to load the 24dsi12 (ADC) module, couldn't find it for some reason, but other than that, seems to boot up.

So it seems to be some issue with the realtime kernel?

What would cause the realtime kernel to be able to boot on one machine (the BASE station) but not the another (the ROVER)?

The ROVER currently has an exact copy of the BASE station boot pen drive, which I did with 'dd'.

Thanks,

David

[MTCAT]

Hi everyone,

Update III - sorry for all these posts, I don't know if this is good now, I hope it is, but after plugging in the Cactus pen drive into a different USB port, and making some BIOS changes, the real time kernel has booted up three times in a row now on the ROVER!!!???

I turned off "fast boot" in the BIOS and made it additionally do a full memory check on the RAM as well, which I don't do on the BASE unit, but whatever, must be something different hardware wise going on with the USB ports on the ROVER Vortex-DX3??

Just for interest sake, would it be quite difficult/time consuming to get my system to boot TinyCore off the CF-card instead?, on which is located Lubuntu already, I wonder if that might be more reliable across different SBC's.

Thanks,

David