BBB won't mount via usb with latest images. Please help

[Arlin Vanderbilt]

I recently dusted off my Beaglebone black which I purchased back in 2013 for a project at our makerspace. After considerable difficulty trying to connect to wifi I decided it might be prudent to upgrade to one of the latest firmware images. 

So I loaded the 2015-3-1 Debian image onto an SD card and booted from that. The first thing I noticed was that the board wouldn't mount when connected to a laptop by usb cable. Which, of course means I couldn't connect to beaglebone.local or 192.168.7.2. However, I was able to determine that linux appeared to be operating fine otherwise as I was able to ssh in via ethernet and serial with no problems. Thinking that maybe it was a Debian problem I also burned the 2013-6-20 Angstrom image to an SD card and booted off that. Once again it appeared fine via ssh but I couldn't mount the beaglebone or connect to beaglebone.local.

The original 2013 eMMC flashed os is still on the bbb. I can still boot from eMMC and mount the device and connect to beaglebone.local as expected.

Can anyone tell me what's going on here? Is my slightly old BBB not compatible with the latest images? Or are there some limitations with operating from the SD card that I'm just not aware of?

[William Hermans]

This problem could be for multiple reasons, and sometimes depends on which OS the host machine is running.

1st - The newer images do not have a FAT partition any longer. So Windows machines will not be able to see that the shared partition - Assuming there is a shared partition via g_multi.

2nd - In the case of Windows( again ), the driver needed to mount the newer images has probably changed. To make matters worse, Windows handles device drivers very poorly - automagically. So manual intervention may be

 required. e.g. if having an older device driver installed, but the newer image requires an updated driver. Windows can often fail silently.

As for other host OSes, OSX has had issues with one or more versions ( I'm thinking Mountain Lion ? ) which were related to g_ether. But since you're able to ssh in, and I'm assuming via USB. Then this is not the problem. Just in case you are using OSX though. These problems had nothing to do with this hardware, and everything to do with OSX.

As to why that version of Angstrom is not working . . . yeah No idea. More information would be needed. But honestly you're probably going to want to be using the latest Debian images.

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[Robert Nelson]

Console or lxde?

The console doesn't do that by default...

[Arlin Vanderbilt]

Thanks for getting back to me. That makes sense about the drivers having changed. I should have mentioned that I had the same problem with both a windows and a linux laptop. I'll try updating drivers on the windows machine and running the mkudevrule.sh script from the getting started page on my linux machine.

Regarding Debian vs. Angstrom. Am I correct in understanding that the latest Debian images provide all the same functionality as the original Angstrom (usb mounting, cloud9, io interfacing etc.)?

Thanks again!

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[William Hermans]

Regarding Debian vs. Angstrom. Am I correct in understanding that the latest Debian images provide all the same functionality as the original Angstrom (usb mounting, cloud9, io interfacing etc.)?

Thanks again!

Yes and no. They should provide the same functionality - When configured to do so. However with the latest images. There have been improvements, and updates to many things. Not least of which is to the kernel. cloud9 has also been changed / updated. I/O interfacing may be slightly different but for all intents and purposes is the same. Except now, with the latest images, there are additional tool(s).

To be sure though there are differences between how some things are done, and which tools are available via the command line. But Debian is actively being worked on by this community ( largely by Robert Nelson ). It is also now the default Linux being used by new, and currently shipping beaglebone black's.

Passed that . . .I don't know, maybe since I've been using Debian since the 90's I'm somewhat biased. But I just feel that Debian is better in general. I can tell you that Debian is a distro that emphasizes stability, and correctness / reliability. Hence why it is generally behind the technology curve when compared to more cutting edge distro's such as something like Sabayon Linux( truly cutting / bleeding edge fork of gentoo ).

Anyway, Debian is actively being worked on by the Debian community, as well as this community specifically for this hardware.