CRC error when recovering bootloader

VisionFive 2 （English Forum)
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1

I’ve been playing with building and flashing u-boot and OpenSBI from upstream which worked at first but now I’m getting a hard hang early on when booting from the SD card.

I switched the DPI for UART booting and followed the process described here. However, after uploading any of the recovery images with minicom using xmodem protocol, I get a “CRC Error try again” error message as shown below:

(C)StarFive                                                                                                         
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCRC Error, Try again                                                     
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

This issue is the same as reported here but I think no solution was offered?

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2

Wrong recovery image. The CRC check is specific to JH7110, and was not present in JH7100.

Refer to this thread:

3

@rvalles I checked that thread before but I’m not sure how it can help.

Is there a correct recovery image, if yes which one? I tried all of them from GitHub - starfive-tech/Tools and still got the same issue. Or, do I have to build my own recovery image?

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4

From Tools/recovery at master · starfive-tech/Tools · GitHub

jh7110-recovery-20221205.bin is the one I know I have tried and works.

5

Also, I heard about some implementation bug affecting XMODEM as implemented in the rom.

If you are using lrzsz (which minicom does), try a different implementation. I know teraterm’s works.

Tio also has its own implementation, which might also work.

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6

Tried jh7110-recovery-20221205.bin with minicom and tio, got the same “CRC Error, Try again” error. I don’t see teraterm packaged for my Linux distro, so I guess I’d have to build it from sources…

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7

It’s impossible to brick the board. The zero stage bootloader is in ROM, and unchangeable. When you set the boot mode to sdcard, the SPI flash will be bypasased, and the zero stage will directly load from sdcard. If you are still seeing the CRC errors, check if you’ve copied the correct file to the sdcard, and also the sdcard should have the appropriate layout.

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8

Yes! I was able to recover it using the sdcard. But I didn’t use the recovery image. Instead, I used the sdcard.img image. However, when booting from the sdcard I was getting:

dwmci_s: Response Timeout.
BOOT fail,Error is 0xffffffff

I kept rebooting, maybe 5 or 7 times, until it booted into the u-boot shell. From there I was able to flash the SPL and u-boot images and everything is working now.

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Yeah, I’m seeing the same thing. The root cause is that the zero stage bootloader in the ROM doesn’t set the sdcard PIN properly (drive strength). And there’s a possibly that booting directly from sdcard could fail (depending on type/model of the card). I usually get 1/3 failure rate. So flashing the image to SPI flash is the way to go. The SPL code will adjust drive strength to the proper value. There’s no way to fix the zero stage however (burnt in silicon).

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10

You’re not running enough power to it.
RC

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lrzsz has a crap ton of issues, I tried to use minicom and all the lrzsz based dumb terminal emulators but they all threw an error and I was forced to edit the flags and such manually. I just recommend you to use tio, which is objectively better as it always works.

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I never have a problem with minicom. Just make sure you change the permissions to the default config file to writable, also tail messages or syslog to make sure you’re using the correct serial. In my case it’s always the same.

Run minicom with a -s option to configure it, make sure you select save as default.

RC

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