Cubian does not boot anymore after cubian update - cubieplayer/Cubian GitHub Wiki

This is a little howto what to do if cubieboard does not boot anymore after "update-cubian".

Obviously something goes wrong with the uboot part, but your actual installation in nand memory remains in order. So what i did was that i booted from fresh cubian sd-card image, wrote contents of /dev/nandc to gzipped tar container on a usb-stick. Adjusted user and group ids on the sdcard image to be equal to the ones on nand. Then performed a nand-install from sd-card, deleted all contents of /dev/nandc and copied the before created tar.gz container to /dev/nandc.

  1. Create fresh sd-card image and boot from sd-card
  2. plug in usb stick
  3. mount usbstick
sudo mkdir /mnt/flash
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash (where sda1 should be your usb-stick)
  1. mount nand contents
sudo mkdir /mnt/nand
sudo mount /dev/nandc /mnt/nand
  1. copy contents of /dev/nandc to usb stick
sudo tar -zcvf backup_dev_nandc.tar.gz /mnt/nand
  1. adjust user and groups on the sd-image to be the same as on nand
sudo cp /mnt/nand/etc/passwd /etc/passwd
sudo cp /mnt/nand/etc/group /etc/group
  1. Unmount nand
sudo umount /mnt/nand
  1. Install SD-Image to nand
apt-get install cubian-nandinstall
sudo cubian-nandinstall
  1. Delete contents from nand root filesystem
sudo mount /dev/nandc /mnt/nand
sudo rm -R /mnt/nand/*
  1. unpack contents from your backup file on usb-stick to nandc
sudo tar -C / -zxvf /mnt/flash/backup_dev_nandc.tar.gz

This is where tar needs userid and groupid to be identical on sd-card boot image and the to be restored nand system otherwise it will complain.

  1. Reboot
sudo shutdown -h now
  1. remove sd-card
  2. power up cubieboard

Hopefully that will be it.