How to flash Debian 7.5 (2014-05-14) to eMMC?

[Jeffrey Milloy]

I'm trying to write Debian 7.5 (2014-05-14) onto a BeagleBoneBlack Industrial from Element14, but following the instructions at http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian#Flashing_eMMC didn't work. It doesn't flash the image at reboot (at least, there is no LED flashing pattern).

Here is no init-eMMC-flasher-v3.sh file in the Debian 7.5 image, so I ran a git pull from /opt/scripts and got the script.

What do I need to do to flash the eMMC at reboot? Should I use a different script that the v3 one? Or will it fail for other reasons?

I am willing to do it manually with dd. It looks like I want something like

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk1

But the drive at /dev/mmcblk0 is 16Gb (the size of my microSD card) and the eMMC drive is only 4Gb, so it fails. Maybe I need to make a partition on /dev/mmcblk1 and do something like the following. How should I set up that partition on the command line?

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 of=/dev/mmcblk1p1

Backstory: I am trying to upgrade from 2Gb BeagleBoneBlack boards to 4Gb BeagleBoneBlack Industrial boards from Element14. The old boards have Debian 7.5 (2014-05-14) on them and work just fine. The BBB Industrial boards come with Debian 7.9, and I haven't been able to get serial communication over /dev/ttyO1 working. Serial communication is working fine on a BBB Industrial from the SD card boot of 7.5, so if I could just flash 7.5 on the new boards, that might be a quicker fix that diagnosing the serial communication issues.

[Robert Nelson]

You can grab the "original" eMMC flasher here:

https://debian.beagleboard.org/images/BBB-eMMC-flasher-debian-7.5-2014-05-14-2gb.img.xz

NOTE:

it will 'boot' to a desktop and start flashing the eMMC, just wait for
it to shutdown. (i think the desktop says "this is a temp session", or
something.) it's flashing setup was totally un-reliable in the end
and we moved to a different method a few months later, which you see
documented.

Regards,

--
Robert Nelson
https://rcn-ee.com/

[Jeffrey Milloy]

Thank you.