Hello everyone,
I have been using the Beaglebone Blue for over 3 months now without any problems until now. The board typically boots off the SD card, primarily because I needed the extra space for a ROS installation. I originallyt used the latest Debian Jessie image for a couple of months and then created a new SD card (early December 2017) with the new Debian stretch image and then setup ROS (from source).
EMMC does not boot anymore
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I recently noticed that when the SD card is removed, the board will not boot from the EMMC for some reason. This was clearly not the case about a month ago when I moved on to stretch, so whatever caused this must have happened recently. I typically power the board from the USB and occasionally from an external 12V DC source. In terms of devices, I am using the IMU and the UART to talk to a motor controller (Roboteq in particular), but during the last month the controller was not connected, so the board was practically running with no external devices connected to it. I once or twice briefly used different SD cards on it.
Other (potentially) Related Issues
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In addition to not booting from the EMMC, I noticed occasional hangs during updates and/or prolonged downloads. In some cases, the crashed download/update process can be interrupted by Ctrl-C and in others not. Regardless, the Beaglebone does not work properly, as many subsequent commands (for instance, "ps") will crash and the only way to recover is by hard reset. However, in many occasions after the reset, the root file system is corrupted and we have to repair it using fsck.
Consistency
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I originally believed that the stretch installation was the source of the crash problem (did not think it was related to the EMMC not booting up), so I re-installed Debian Jessie and stretch multiple times to realize that the crashing-during-updates problem was consistently re-appearing regardless of Debian version at various stages. Thus, I was led to believe that this a board issue rather than something that has to do with the Debian and most probably, not being able to boot from the EMMC is a symptom of the same problem. In my last attempt, I burned the stretch image into the SD card and the Debian could not update right off the bat (it gave a root file system error :
E: List directory /var/lib/apt/lists/partial is missing. - Acquire (30: Read-only file system)
Note that the Beaglebone Blue board appears to be in working order otherwise (i.e., wireless appears to work, cloud page, etc.).
I would very much appreciate your help in troubleshooting this problem and most importantly, finding out its cause.
Regards
George