How to recover a IGEP bricked board
From IGEP - ISEE Wiki
Contents
How to recover a bricked IGEPv2 board
Overview
This tutorial will help recover a board in which the flash memory was erased or corrupted and can no longer boot. There are several possible procedures to achieve this, the one followed here uses a micro SD card.
Getting the right files
1) Follow the wiki tutorial on The bootloader X-loader until you get the two resulting files: The file x-load-ddp.bin.ift is meant to boot the board from flash, therefore we need to write that one to the flash. The other file x-load.bin.ift is the one that will be able to boot our board (very important to get the one from the sdcard directory, as there's one in the flash directory also but won't work).
2) Follow the wiki tutorial on The bootloader U-Boot until you get the resulting file: u-boot.bin
SD Card preparation
3) Now follow this tutorial to prepare a micro SDCARD. You don't need the Linux partition, just make sure that the FAT partition has 255 tracks per cylinder and 63 sectors per track or XLoader will fail to read it.
4) Copy the file x-load-bin.ift (make sure it's the one from the sdcard directory) to a file named MLO in the root directory of the card. Then copy the files x-load-ddp.bin.ift and u-boot.bin also to the root dir.
First boot
5) Simply put the card in and start your board. If everything goes well, you should see X-Loader loading u-boot and the usual "Press a key to stop autoboot". Stop the autoboot process and now you need to flash your firmware.
6) The following commands will flash the new XLoader and u-boot (that you put in the SD card) according to the latest MTD partitions. Note that you might need to use different MTD partitions, in which case the size and offset arguments of the 'erase' and 'write' commands below need to be adjusted (see the u-boot manual for 'onenand erase' and 'onenand write' command syntax).
mmc init fatload mmc 0 0x80300000 x-load-ddp.bin.ift onenand erase 0 0x80000 onenand write 0x80300000 0 0x80000 fatload mmc 0 0x80300000 u-boot.bin onenand erase 0x80000 0x180000 onenand write 0x80300000 0x80000 0x180000
7) Remove the SD card and power cycle the board. XLoader and u-boot should start. If you got lucky, your old environment might still be there. Use printenv to see what's left of it. If not, then you'll need to restore your old environment. The easiest way is to simply type the whole thing back and use saveenv.
8) Once your environment is restored, try to boot. If the kernel doesn't boot, you need to reflash it, but at least your board is back to life now.
