BeagleBoard xM

Booting the BeagleBoard xM

I have a Rev.C board.

Step 1 - Preparing the SD Card

You need to dimension the SD card correctly, and before you can do that you need to know the size of your SD card;

sudo fdisk -l $SD_DEV | grep Disk | grep bytes | cut -d ' ' -f 5

This will give you the size of your card in bytes (e.g. 8018460672). To convert this to Cylinders, you must divide and round down as follows:

8018460672 / 255 / 63 / 512 = 974.855649 -> 974

You then need to create the first (boot) partition with these dimensions applied:

HEADS=255
SECTORS=63
CYLINDERS=974
echo ,9,0x0C,* | sudo sfdisk -D -H $HEADS -S $SECTORS -C $CYLINDERS $SD_DEV

You can now create any other partitions you may require (I like to have 2, one for the system, one for the user)

Step 2 - Making the SD Card bootable

Format the boot partition as FAT32:

sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${SD_DEV}1

And copy X-loader, and U-Boot onto the SD Card:

sudo mount ${SD_DEV}1 ./t
sudo cp x-loader/MLO ./t/MLO
sudo cp u-boot/u-boot.bin ./t/u-boot.bin
sudo cp linux/arch/arm/boot/uImage ./t/uImage
sudo umount ./t
sync