A13-SOM boot from NAND

[Fedx]

Hi,

we have a custom baseboard with A13-SOM and we are not able to boot from nand (we have soldered in the baseboard the same nand chipset of A13-SOM-WIFI-4GB).

Boot from SD is ok and we can read/write nand without problem. Using dd we have created an image of the first 16MB from A13-SOM-WIFI-4GB nand(which contains a bootable android image). Then we have written this image in our nand.

After boot there is no activity in uart interface. Partition is ok because the output of nand-part tool is the same on both nand.

Have you any ideas about what we can check/try?

[UPDATE] it seems that there is a part of nand not accessible by sunxi nand driver(we have zeros all the nand on A13-SOM-WIFI-4GB and boot0/boot1 starts again). We are able to install boot0 and boot1 using PhoenixCard tool from AllWinner. This tool creates a self-flashing sd card, after boot from sd the nand will be flashed and boot0/boot1 correctly start. Now we try to start debian...

[shinemoon]

Sure, we met very similar issue , not only A13, but we believe at least A10 also have such issue.

Seems Allwinner have so tricky/weak nand driver which is not roburst enough for different nand , or even different batch  in totally same type will cause brick there....

so, basically 'dd' is not the good enough selection if want to do real some volume production due to the poor nand driver in allwinner chips...

[gazum]

We are able to install boot0 and boot1 using PhoenixCard tool from AllWinner.

Could you please provide more details? How do you do it?

Thank you.

[Fedx]

I'm sorry, i read your reply only now.

You can found the PhoenixCard tool here:
http://chinagadgetsreviews.blogspot.ro/2013/09/download-phoenixcard-v306.html

Using this tool you can prepare an sd card with a self-flashing Android image.

Boot your board with this sd card and android will be installed in the nand(including AllWinner boot loaders).

After that the board is bootable from nand so you can install u-boot and debian as usually(in our case we are not interested to use Android).