From time to time I read posts where people wrote that their Efika MX Smartbook does not boot any more. The only thing which it does is white power led blinking about twice per second. Standard reply in such case is “send device back to Genesi”.
Some time ago a friend of mine borrowed Efika MX Smartbook from me. During his experiments he managed to get netbook into such state. I have serial/jtag debug dongle so decided to take a look at it (and unbrick device). I managed to fix it but also somehow broke serial port so can not check why my automate way does not want to work.
What needs to be done to get Smartbook back to live? Few things:
- SD card
- small screwdriver
- U-Boot from EfikaMX updater image
- U-Boot script which will flash U-Boot into NOR
- Linux account with root permissions
- working SD-bootable U-Boot — this one still requires serial dongle, sorry for that. Will replace it with proper one when will get serial port working again.
Needed steps:
- Repartition SD card. You can use any tool for it. All what has to be done is set up first partition at 1MB offset so we have space for U-Boot.
- Format partition (if needed) as FAT.
- Run “
sudo dd if=u-boot.imx of=/dev/sdd bs=1k seek=1” (replace /dev/sdd with your SD card). - Put card into SD slot of Efika MX Smartbook.
- Take out keyboard — you need to use small screwdriver to push holes near F1, F6, F10, End keys.
- Change DIP switches - they are in a middle of motherboard. You need to reverse default setup.
- Power on your Efika. There should be U-Boot output on screen. You may even get system loaded up at this step ;)
- Take out SD card and copy ‘boot.scr’ to it.
- Power off Efika, put SD card and boot.
- Old U-Boot will be stored into NOR flash (output will be visible on screen).
- Change DIP switches - they are in a middle of motherboard. You need to reverse them to default setup.
- Put keyboard back.
- Take out SD card.
- Boot your Efika MX Smartbook — operating system should load.
Some information:
- old U-Boot got flashed because new one was not tested for NOR boot
- finding out information for this how to took me few hours
- this procedure can be done without Efika MX Smartbook serial/jtag dongle
- similar procedure can be used for Efika MX Smarttop but as I do not have such I can not offer help
Thanks goes to:
- Genesi for giving me free Smartbook and serial/jtag dongle
- Marek Vasut for his work on mainlining U-Boot support for Efika MX devices
- Matt Sealey for some hints on IRC