Brain storm: how do I debug this?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 02:42:10PM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> In 2009 I won a SheevaPlug as part of Hamakor Prize. At the time, I made  
> sure it was actually working (it wasn't at first. The problem turned out  
> to be that the MiniUSB cable that was bundled with the device was too  
> short to make contact with the MiniUSB connector inside the device), and  
> that I can connect to it, and that was it.
>
> A little while ago I picked it up again, and found out it wasn't  
> booting. I managed to bootstrap uboot on it (which i compiled from the  
> kirkwood git repository), and boot it into the bundled jffs2 Ubuntu 9.04  
> image that came with it, using a kernel I compiled from git (2.6.38-rc8,  
> and later 2.6.38). So far, so good.
>
> Now I wanted to replace the image on it with Debian. I managed to  
> debootstrap debian onto a disk on key, but when I try to boot it, it  
> hangs during boot. I moved the image to a UBIFS image on the internal  
> nand, but the problem persist. I can boot into single user mode, and  
> everything works, but if I try to let the system boot completely, it  
> just hangs.

Just to clear the impression from those two pargraphs: the SheevaPlug
originally came with a version of Ubuntu. IIRC this turned out to be a
mistake, as Ubuntu does not support those specific ARM CPUs (they have
higher requirements). They are well-supported in Debian. With Lenny you
needed a newer kernel. With Squeeze (the current Stable version) the
standard "-kirkwood" kernel flavour should work fine.

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