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Home / Other I-Appliances / WebPal HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared

HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bgelb Profile I was changing the parameters in flash. I am using a serial interface was MAX203. So, first, I erased the params partition: ben:/home/ben/webpal# stty 9600 < /dev/ttyS0 ben:/home/ben/webpal# ../wpflash erase params Reboot Webpal to begin programming... Attempting to contact programmer...done Initializing flash...done Erasing params sectors.done. It worked fine, but when I tried to write the params, it wouldn't work. Now, if I turn on the WebPal normally, the green light comes on, none others, and nothing happens after that, no video signal, etc. I get the same behavior as if I just simply remove the flash chip. Is there any way to restore my WebPal? Does anybody know what happened? Thanks, Ben 01-04-2003 14:06:11

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bigbrd Profile You don't need to erase a partition before you "write" it. The wpflash program will do that for you first when you write a partition. So just do a "write params" to change the params partition. Its possible that the bootstrap has a bug where it does not start if the parameters file is erased. Let me try this on one of my systems and see if I can come up with a workaround if that is the case. If not, you can mail me your flash and I'll reprogram it for you. Bill 01-04-2003 21:59:16

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bgelb Profile Thanks very much. I appreciate it a lot. -Ben 01-04-2003 22:36:09

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bigbrd Profile There is indeed a bug in the boot loader if the params partition is erased. In my system, the bug didn't do enough damage to keep it from booting if only the params partition was erased, but it did hang if the root partition was also erased. In any case, its not really predicable what would and wouldn't happen since its overwriting the end of a string looking for a end of line character. Here is one thing to try, but probably won't work. If things were working, an erased params would mean to use the display/parallel port for programming. Since I think you wanted to use the serial port, try holding down the switch inside the webpal when you reset during programming. If you are very very very lucky, it might just work! If not, send me an email (my email address is at the end of the page at http://webpal.bigbrd.com ) and I will send you my mailing address and instructions and I'll reprogram the chip with a new bootloader and a params file. I've got a newer version of the bootloader that is more robust in the case of garbaged or erased params partitions. I'll also download it to the webpage in a couple days. 01-04-2003 23:37:39

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bgelb Profile OK. I may wind up mailing it to you. Pressing SW2 doesn't help, do you think programming with a paralell cable might work? Or am I just stuck? Also, a friend of mine also bought a WebPal. Since his is working fine, could we install the mtd tools package mentioned at http://www.luban.org/Webpal/ (and appropriate kernel support), hot swap his good flash for my bad one, and write a new image to my flash chip? Is this a) possible and b) a good a idea, or am I just better off mailing it to you? Thanks! -Ben 01-05-2003 12:38:42

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bigbrd Profile If your friend has a working flash chip with my monitor in it you can do the following. I'm assuming here you are using the serial port for all this...it would be similar with the parallel port, except you wouldn't use the "nowait" command on the second wflash command as described below. 1. Do some sort of wpflash read command to get the monitor into programming mode: # wpflash read params /tmp/foobar 2. After its says to reboot, power-cycle or reboot the system as normal and let the read command complete. Assuming it completes successfully, you've now got the monitor in programming mode which runs completely out of RAM. You can remove your friends flash and put in your bad flash. This isn't entirely legal (it never is legal to insert and remove chips when the power is on), but several people have done it and it seems to work ok. 3. Execute the command you want to run on your flash but with the -nowait option (don't use nowait command if using -p for doing this via parallel port): # wpflash -nowait write params good.param.file You could do multiple wpflash commands here if you need to fix multiple things. I think that should work and would save you the hassle of mailing things to me. Bill 01-05-2003 19:46:40

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bgelb Profile Welll I got my friend's flash chip, loaded your linux image on it. It works ok. I boot it up and read the params off of it. Fine. I switch the flash chip and try to write, It says Attempting to contact programmer... and just sits there. I have tried this a few times. Same result each time. Any ideas? 01-06-2003 16:51:10

RE:HELP! I think my flash chip has been cleared (modified 0 times) bgelb Profile Scratch that, I figured it out. Here is the process I needed to do. do a # wpflash read params /tmp/foo followed by # wpflash -nowait params /tmp/foo THEN change the chips # wpflash -nowait params /tmp/foo # wpflash -nowait write all linux.flash.image It seems I need to do a nowait before I change the chips, or maybe it was the read before the write, not sure, but this combination works for me anyways. Thanks for all your help! -Ben 01-06-2003 16:56:34

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