Sunday, 5 October 2014

Beaglebone Black using SD card as extra storage

These instructions are to use an SD card as extra storage on your beaglebone black. The beaglebone boots from internal memory and has micro SD card available for storage.

I used a Ubuntu operating system (running inside Virtual Box) to format the SD card and create the uEnv.txt file that tells the BBB not to use it as a booting device, but as external storage. My host comuputer operating system is Windows 7.

A. Format the SD card - Follow these steps


1. Insert the microSD into a USB hub on computer 

2. Mount the SD card in virtual box
3. Open Disks utility
4. Click Format and format the drive


B. Create uEnv.txt on SD card
1. Open the the volume with the file explorer and create a new file in it named uEnv.txt
2. Right Click > Create Document > Empty File
3. Open uEnv.txt and fill it with the following 4 lines of code:
mmcdev=1
bootpart=1:2
mmcroot=/dev/mmcblk1p2 ro
optargs=quiet
(Ref: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:MicroSD_As_Extra_Storage)

C. Configure beaglebone to attach SD card on boot
1. Insert microSD in beaglebone and open ssh terminal, connect to beaglebone
2. nano to /etc/fstab file. You might need to provide chmod administrative write access for the file
3. Add the following line of code to the file
/dev/mmcblk0p1    /media/card     auto     auto,rw,async,user,nofail  0  0
(Ref: http://hifiduino.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/beaglebone-black-accessing-usd-and-usb-storage/)

D. Restart beaglebone

2 comments:

  1. Hey it's not working for me, I even tried changing /media/card to the actual name of my device... I get 3 solid LED on bootup. It works fine without SD inserted.

    Any suggestions? Feel free to e-mail aelkman@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30857575/using-sd-card-as-external-storage-for-beaglebone-black

    ReplyDelete