Help With X5000 Booting/UBoot (plus, general newbie x5000 questions) (SOLVED)

(EDIT: issues described in this post are solved, see #12)
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When I got my X1000 I got a very useful guide with it that explained CFE. With the X5000 I bought (private) I have received no such guide.

Some commands are similar to CFE, but there are too many differences. On CFE I could actually perform something like: "help ls" and it seemed to offer me more information about that command, but this does not seem the case with UBoot.

The issue I am having at the moment is that I want to perform a totally clean installation of AmigaOS4 with my received machine. I am not fond of using someone else's installation.

What came with the X5000 was an AmigaOS4.1 FE USB flash drive. When I plug in the FD then the icons appear: "AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition", "Extras Installer" and "AmigaOS 4.1 FileSystems".

If I insert the FD either on a port at the front hub, or use the "proper" USB ports at the back and then selection the option to boot from mass storage things seem to be going okay at first. I get something like: loading files / execution from 0x200 etc. Then, I get the following (see image) and it just hangs, doing nothing.

https://i.postimg.cc/XqMVMNgz/20220416-194104.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/rFk8Qmsd/20220416-194858.jpg

My questions (the main one at the top):
- what am I doing wrong wrt. booting from the USB FD?
- if I have AmigaOS4.1FE does that I can download the images for AmigaOS4.1FE for the X1000 / X5000? Presumably, these are different because the X1000 ISO will contain the amigaboot.of file, where as the X5000 one will not. I am not sure how different these are and whether it matters
- what is the significance of the microSD card in the X5000? Is this just firmware for the motherboard? i.e. it is not the same as Amigaboot.of. I ask because sometimes the version of amigaboot.of needed to be different depending on what media you were trying to load... e.g. X1000 First Contact would only load with a lower version amigaboot.of

@rjd324

On the boot, USB stick will be auto attached and shown in uboot by default not from all the USB ports connected. If i remember right back ones are best, but basically that not so matter, you can reset them.

So, when you power on x5000 and have usb stick in, you then hit "esc" wait till your uboot menu. Choose there "command line", and type "usb reset".

Check that when things reset, that you have your stick. If it found, and correct image is written on, you then just type "boota" and that all.

Keep in mind, not every software properly wrote iso images to usb stick, the one which 101% works for usb sticks and i tested myself it by having boot usb for x5000 and sam460 are "rawrite32" win32 prog: https://www.netbsd.org/~martin/rawrite32/download.html

Others users may tell you that they use other tools and they works, that possible, but i just found this one is always working fine exactly for amiga-ng needs.

Also, all those "menu" buttons like "Boot from xxxx" are programmed by uboot environemnt and shipped with some "default" settings from a-eon, which may not fits your needs as well (they can be easyly changed and saved later).

EDIT: on second screenshot it looks like you about to load all kernel modules, and then hung : my suggestion is that because you have RadeonRX installed, and AOS4 do not have driver for it by default. So you need or RadeonHD for install OS4, or, create your own usb boot which containt radeonrx drivers (i have done that for my sam460). But you also need serial cable if you want play with all this for real.

@rjd324
By the way, if you have serial cable attached, good idea can be connect terminal in a way that you can type commands from your connected terminal window (putty for example), and not by x5000's keyboards (faster work, easy copy+paste, scrollable buffers), etc.

Usually i just connet via putty with flow control set to NONE, and then i am able to type things from putty and control x5000 by. Then once x5000 powerup, i hit "esc" (in putty, via PC keyboard), it go to uboot, then hit "m" to go to command line, and can type then commands.

The same "help" works fine and bring lot of commands:



Most improtant for checking what is used currently via "printenv" command. My one for example:



See there i have "linuxboot", "mos", etc, those ones are what happens when you choose in the main boot menu those "boot linux" , "boot morphos" , etc, which you can change as you wish and then "saveenv".

@kas1e

Then I guess it is something wrong with the flash drive.

Thanks for taking the time to answer, but I guess I now I need my other question answered:

- if I have AmigaOS4.1FE does that I can download the images for AmigaOS4.1FE for the X1000 / X5000? Presumably, these are different because the X1000 ISO will contain the amigaboot.of file, where as the X5000 one will not. I am not sure how different these are and whether it matters

In addition, I am confused by the "boota" option, I mean, if I do a "usb reset" it somehow magically knows to boot the usb drive, where as if I run it without a USB FD in then it knows to magically know to boot the HDD? It would make sense if there were boot priorities etc, but I cannot see how it knows which AmigaOS I wanted to boot. Is there a variable I can look at or a command?

So far, I find that CFE easier to understand and control.

@rjd342
Quote:

I don't know where and how you can download them if at all, but i can say that for all the platforms ISOs different. You can't install X1000 one on X5000, or another way. Because for each platform some modules are different. For example kernel, newlib and some others. So for x5000 you need x5000 iso and nothing else. For x5000 that is AmigaOneX5000InstallCD-53.26.iso. Where to get it officially i do not know, but i assume from those ones who sold the x5000, dunno.

Quote:

All those CFE, uboots and OperFirmware are crap, and none of them better or worse imho :)

I can ask the seller, but in the meantime, I wonder if I can perform grab an image of this USB stick and perform a hash on it and compare to the official hash to ensure there is no loss in data integrity. Of course, since I do not have the official ISO then I cannot even get the official hash.

But I also would think that a lot of X5000 users only were supplied with a USB Flash drive and could find themselves in a similar situation to mine. What would they do?

@rjd342

Dunno, maybe you can just ask them for ISO to download. But anyway, be sure you install it on RadeonHD, as i say no x5000 isos have drivers for RadeonRX (mean stop after kickstart loads)

Okay

1 - I tried to register the serial number but it says "invalid". This is from an official looking Hyperion card. Not sure what "invalid" means. Whether it means he has already registered with it, or whether they key is just invalid - but I have now tried slowly, twice, with the same result.

2 - I never knew that I had to use a HD card. Could that be why I am getting a hang at: https://postimg.cc/CBNykgXG ?

@rjd324
Quote:

Of course.

What i trying to say few times : OS4 ISO do not have RadeonRX drivers. Only some custom small "lite" version of RadeonHD drivers. So while wiht RadeonHD you can boot and install os (but they you still need "Full" drivers), with RadeonRX you can't install a shit, if you didn't made your custom boot image / boot usb with your RadeonRX drivers put in.

(EDIT: issues described in this post are solved, see #12)
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Okay, using a HD card did work; I used the Radeon 5450. But now I run into more issues.

First, here are some pictures of the kicklayout file/startup sequence from the current flash drive I have:

https://i.postimg.cc/fLfRd20b/20220416-213630.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/BQ6n8CZq/20220416-213924.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/sXsV3Y0C/20220416-213939.jpg

Also, I video of what I am trying to do and the fact that when I boot with this flash drive I just get a reset after what looks like a classic ROM screen.

On top of this, I cannot modify any files on the flash drive, which I did not expect. It looks like it is write protected.

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/TagA7dhr93Q

If you haven't already, take a look at the wiki here http://wiki.amiga.org/index.php?title=X5000_Emergency_Boot_USB

@daveyw
Thank you. I now know that the correct ROW is necessary. The issues I was having above were because
1. I was using an RX video card (SOLVED)
2. I has the flash drive in the row immediately below the top ROW, instead of the 3rd (SOLVED).

Why do they call it an Emergency Boot though? It is nothing more than the X5000 prerelease ISO.

My next tasks are to:
- reinstall from clean, AmigaOS4 on the SSD drive.
- drastically clean up the UBOOT environment and all the bloat variables and configuration that it comes with.
- somehow get the registration key to be added to my account. I am talking to the seller / hyperion support.

I have to ask, then:

- Are people using the NG filesystem?
- what is the version of the X5000 Cd that you guys have compared to mine?
- why are things such as "bootmorphos" an actual internal uboot command? this seems like it should not be a command.
- I dislike how the X5 has less sata slots. Can a SIL3512 come in a PCI Express form rather than PCI? Already, one slot is taken for the sound card, and I may need to take the other for the catweasel. So it is either, get a PCIE sound card, or get a PCIE SIL3512.

@rjd324
Quote:

Because its amiga :) But on serious note : this boot usb allow you to boot , so you can fix things on your broken / unbootable hdd.

Quote:

That will be easy: you install what you have on usb, then update1 then update2.

Quote:

Be very carefull, as things can go bad if you will kill something important and then "saveenv". Through there always a way to switch to "base" environemtns.

Quote:

Yes, with X5000 probably most of us. At least i use it on my x5000 since day one when i got my x5000 few years ago. Boot and work partitions on my setup are NGFS and one SFS partition for Morphos (which i can see/work with from os4 as well).

Quote:

Probably everyone got 53.25.

Quote:

For make things for casual users maybe.

Quote:

For sound card you better go PCIe route and take Sound Blaster Audigy FX PCI-E (drivers on os4depot): https://youtu.be/iGE1Hm1LF1I

@kas1e

Thanks. I ordered the sound card you suggested which frees up a PCI slot.

As for the UBOOT menu, is it possible to delete the entry that says "boot morphos" / "boot linux" or are these hardcoded menu options (gadgets) that you must keep?

Actually, I'm not using any NGFS partitions on my X5000 anymore. I have found it too unstable. I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong, but I have lost 2 NGFS partitions in the past.

I will try and check the version of my X5000 boot CD, but I don't currently have a computer with a CD/DVD drive (the DVD drive in my X5000 has stopped working again even though I replaced it in December). It was the version I downloaded when I built my machine back in 2017.

I haven't faced any problems running out of PCI slots. I have a PCI sata; originally also had a PCI network card, replaced it with a PCIe network card that subsequently died, by which time a driver for the onboard ethernet was available. Soundcard is a cheap PCIe one I got from Aliexpress, but if I had the money today I would get the Audilogy FX. The soundcard was the last component I added to my build several months later.

As for uboot commands, booting some environments like Linux require some very complex commands, so you can save a shortcut command that can execute them more easily (that's my impression,please correct me if I'm wrong).

Take care, it's vey easy to mangle uboot and make your machine unbootable (as I once did with a SAM that didn't belong to me and scrambled to fix!)

@daveyw
Quote:While you can kill some of the old systems with failed U-Boot updates and need to replace a chip to make them usable again (at least the AmigaOne SE, XE and Mini, not sure about the Sam systems, IIRC they should have U-Boot twice in the ROM and being able to switch between both versions if updating one of them failed, but I don't know if that really was implemented) you can't kill it just by changing U-Boot variables.
Any changes you do there which might lead to an unbootable system can easily be reverted.

On the X5000 there is no problem at all, U-Boot as well as it's variables are on a MicroSD card and in worst case all you have to do is to restore it from an image file (can be done on any other system with a MicroSD card reader), or replace it by a new MicroSD card with the U-Boot image stored on it.

Interesting issues yet again.

Usb boot drive will just not boot. Inserted into the correct row and using the radeon hd card.

Great. More inconsistencies.

Just gets stuck on:

About to call loader entry....

I have stripped the machine.

Everything removed other than the keyboard and the USB flash drive into the third row.

I have even unplugged all the sata drives.

I have also a second flash drive and I just dd'd a fresh download of the x5000 iso. Everytime, hanging at that same point.

I tried with both the radeon 5xxx that came with the x5000 and a radeon 4xxxx.

This is utterly ridiculous.

Okay. Woah.

It's my fault. Attaching serial provided the cause.

Actually, it was not freezing at all. Because I had debuglevel 20 set, the system was writing every detail over serial. That is why it was seemingly hanging!

Funny though, I would expect have expected the same sort of hanging when just booting normally. It's almost as if the kernel used in the ISO image is the "debug" kernel and when combined with debuglevel 20 then is ridiculous amounts of information.

Two things learned (re-learned)

- when in doubt, use serial out.
- be careful with debug level 20.