How do I prepare an SD card for boot using Windows CE 6.0?

[markwilliams]

Hi,

I have been playing with the i.MX28 development board but I am struggling to get my own SD card to boot my own CE 6.0 image.

So far I have performed the following steps:

1) Built a CE image using the Freecscale BSP

2) Used cfimager to put eboot_ivt.sb onto my 2GB SD card using the -a option to create the FAT partition

3) Manually copied NK.bin from my release directory (33-34MB) onto the SD card

4) Put the SD card in the dev board (boot switches on 1001) and watched eboot debug output (freescale logo appears)

5) Pressed space to stop boot and configured eboot to boot from the SD card (and saved settings)

6) Reset the system..... unfortunately my image does not boot.  The output is as follows:

Press [ENTER] to launch image stored in SD/MMC or [SPACE] to cancel.

Initiating image launch in 0 seconds.

Launching flash image  ...

-BLMenu .

INFO: Using device name: 'MX2843204'

INFO: Reading NK image to SDHC (please wait)...

INFO: Copying NK image to RAM address 0xa0200000

INFO: Read is 100% complete

INFO: Copy of NK completed successfully

OEMLaunch called PhysAddress 0x40200000.

Download successful!  Jumping to image at 0x0 (physical 0x40200000)...

BATT:4.24V

B

5

I get the BATT info a few times. What have I done wrong to prevent the system booting up correctly?

Kind regards, Mark

[markwilliams]

After a bit of investigation I found someone else with a similar problem. They found that their nk.bin was larger than the allocated RAM in the bootloader. Altering the RAM allocation fixed this.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winembplatdev/thread/3b310497-1f1d-4c83-945c-5592aefb2...

I noticed that I too had an nk.nb0 and nk.nb1 hinting that I had exceeded the allocated RAM image size.

I managed to reduce my image size to 29MB to test (only had an nk.nbo in the release folder this time) however the system still does not boot, even with this smaller image.

The image read from SD seems to jump straight to 100%, followed by 'download successful' then hangs as above, randomly outputting battery voltage.

I will keep looking but I hope someone has had a similar experience trying their own WCE image on the i.MX28.

Is it definitely ok to just put the nk.bin on the SD card fat partition? For a system release I am not sure if this would be a good idea. Could nk.bin then be deleted while wince is running?

[markwilliams]

I finally managed to get my WCE image to run. Instead of using cfimager to load eboot then drag/drop nk.bin to the SD card I tried using the mfgtool instead.

Using the mfgtool I connected to the board via the USB recovery port then used the tool to load the WCE image and eboot. Following a reset (and reconfigure to SD boot mode) the system booted up correctly.

I am not sure what is wrong with the original approach - this is what is described in the cfimager notes:

To flash the bootloader, use the following command: cfimager -f eboot.sb -d <card reader drive letter without colon>

To load the OS image from the SD/MMC card (with the bootloader), copy the NK.bin to <card reader drive letter without colon>:\

I did exactly this (along with configuring eboot for SD boot) but the system would not boot.

I am interested in whether eboot is intelligent enough to look in the SD fat partition for a file called nk.bin and load that, or whether the image has to be stored at a fixed point in memory outside of the fat partition as it appears mfgtool does.

[hazal_pektas]

I had this problem too and solved with completely formatting the SD card on Ubuntu quick format on Windows did not work, also cfimager only worked with partition (-a command) in my situation.