mirabox: reflashing
i was applying some updates to my mirabox recently (which was running debian wheezy) and i decided hey why don’t i see if i can upgrade this thing to debian jessie. this ended up being a big mistake. jessie installs a version of udev that requires a newer kernel than supplied by the mirabox. i forced a new ARM kernel package on the mirabox and was 98% sure that the system would not come up after a reboot.
my suspicions were correct and i had an unbootable mirabox. after doing some digging i found it was possible to create a microSD rescue disk (download link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0imSF-34b8dZEc0SFo3N1Fzb0E/edit). create a 100MB fat16 partition on a microSD card and then create another partition that consumes the rest of the space as ext3. copy the mirabox file to the fat16 partition and extract the rootfs.tgz file to the ext3 partition.
next interrupt the boot process over a usb-serial connection to get into the uboot mode. with the microSD card inserted into the mirabox run:
usb start
set bootcmd ‘usb start; fatload usb 1 0x6400000 mirabox; bootm 0x6400000’
set bootargs ‘console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sdb2 rootwait’
boot
i ran “usb start” first because it appears that the microSD (MMC) access relies on the usb/mass storage subsystem.
the mirabox will now boot from the microSD rescue disk. on first boot the system seemed to infinitely hang at eth0 becoming available. to get around this i plugged eth0 into a spare wireless router port and tried the boot once more. this time it went much better and i was able to get to a login and use the root/nosoup4u credentials.
i then plugged in a usb stick that i had copied a rootfs_mira_debian7_v5_v7_arm8766.img file to (download location: https://code.google.com/archive/p/mirabox/downloads). i then went to the directory where the usb stick auto-mounted. it ended up being /media/usb2 in my case.
i then ran:
ubiformat /dev/mtd2 –flash-image=rootfs_mira_debian7_v5_v7_arm8766.img
sync
reboot
and removed the microSD card and usb stick.
sources:
https://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3880.0