Does burning a new Angstrom Update Erase Everything?
I’m ashamed to say I never bothered to update to the latest release of Angstrom after I got my BBB… Does it erase everything I’ve done on the board if I do update?
I’m having issues SSHing into my BB for some reason and I’m hoping maybe updating it will fix things… But I’m worried I’ll lose a bunch of stuff.
Yes, flashing a new image will wipe anything on it previously. You’ll want to do an update of individual packages instead, but I’ve forgotten the exact recipe for doing that in Angstrom since I switched to Ubuntu some time ago.
@Noah_Friedman thanks Noah… Well it might just be what I have to do, since I can’t seem to ssh into it anymore. :-/
Before doing anything else I’d recommend doing an image dump of the sdcard or (if you’re using the embedded flash in the BBB) at least making a backup of all the files using “tar”. The last time I tried to update an Angstrom system, it resulted in an unbootable system. That was part of the reason I gave up and switched to another distribution. (But hopefully Angstrom has fixed that problem by now.)
(For anyone new to this)
To back up an sd card; plug it into some other linux system and note whether you’re using a usb or mmc interface, in which case the card will appear as /dev/sdX (for some X in a-z), or /dev/mmcblk0. Then do:
dd if=/dev/whatever of=sdcard.img bs=4M
If you completely hose the sdcard contents, you can restore it by using dd again and swapping the of= and if= filenames.
On the other hand, it might be safer to just diagnose whatever caused ssh (is it actually dropbear or openssh? I forget) to stop working. I presume you have a shell via a console cable at the moment?
For your SSH issue, you might search the Beaglebone Black Google Group. The script here fixed my issue:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/beagleboard/Ya2qE4repSY/q8_WkLcH5TwJ