Flashing the eMMC
So I’m trying to flash the eMMC with the latest version of Angstrom… I did what it said to do, but the board doesn’t seem to be flashing. It just seems to always just boot off of the board. I downloaded the release that said it was for flashing… Is it flipped, or am I missing something? Anyone else have any issues?
if this is about the Beaglebone Black, did you hold the ‘boot’ button (at the far end of the board relative to the power socket, close to the SD slot) while plugging power or USB in, and for a while after?
@Bert_Lindner yes, for the black, and yes I held it until all four lights lit up then started flashing. (That’s what the Adafruit tutorial said, the Beaglebone website didn’t say how long to hold it…)
Have you used some other (say, http://armhf.com) image at some point? Some images re-order the boot-loader to try SD first. In that case booting from the SD might happen if you do not touch any buttons.
If that doesn’t do the trick, I would double check the image. http://downloads.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.12.img.xz should work, or perhaps http://downloads.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/testing/BBB-eMMC-flasher-v2013.12-2013.12.07.img.xz for the cutting edge WIP latest.
Personally I prefer a more orthodox distribution (@Robert_Nelson offers Debian and Ubuntu minimal at http://www.eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black ) but that wouldn’t change anything with the flashing procedure - and on a hardware support level Ångstrom can’t be beat.
That won’t change the issue unfortunately… you’d still have to boot from SD at least once. Sorry to hear it’s not going smoothly yet.
Oh I realized I mistyped.When I try to flash it boots off of the sd card but doesn’t flash it.
Ok… So apparently it just decided to take over 2 hours. weird. Problem solved I guess. 
ah right - yes it takes much longer than one might think (possibly due to slow unpacking of the compressed image)
Yes it takes a gosh long time. There are images that do not flash themselves to the on board flash. Depending on boot load order some folk clobber the NAND flash so only the mSD card is used.
For me the Angstrom image takes 45min to flash not the 20-30 some WiKi pages indicate.
Also watch behavior changes associated with presenting a USB file system and starting ssh … Some actions do not begin until the un mount.
I now use an old USB disk to cache images and short scripts.
Many things are more reliable with additional swap and tempdir space.