How can i boot the IMX7 form SD Card?

Technical Support
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Download the iMX7 image tarball.

On the host machine, partition an SD card creating the first partition with a small FAT32 filesystem (16MB+) [BOOT] and the second partition with a larger (500MB+) ext3 partition [ROOTFS].

Use the following command to extract the rootfs from the image tarball into the ext3 partition [ROOTFS] of the SD card:

sudo tar -C /media/<USER>/<ROOTFS>/ -xvf ~/Downloads/Colibri_iMX7_LinuxImageV2.6Beta2_20160630.tar.bz2 Colibri_iMX7_LinuxImageV2.6/rootfs --strip-components=2

Use the following command to extract the kernel & device tree files from the image tarball to the FAT partition [BOOT] of the SD card & then rename the dtb files:

sudo tar -C /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/ -xvf ~/Downloads/Colibri_iMX7_LinuxImageV2.6Beta2_20160630.tar.bz2 Colibri_iMX7_LinuxImageV2.6/colibri-imx7_bin --strip-components=2
mv /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/zImage--4.1.15-r0-colibri-imx7-20160628110646.bin /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/zImage
mv /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/zImage--4.1.15-r0-imx7d-colibri-eval-v3-20160628110646.dtb /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/imx7d-colibri-eval-v3.dtb
mv /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/zImage--4.1.15-r0-imx7s-colibri-eval-v3-20160628110646.dtb /media/<USER>/<BOOT>/imx7s-colibri-eval-v3.dtb

Unmount the SD card partitions and insert it in the target. And boot the module into the bootloader console. From here you can boot from SD by entering run sdboot. To make sdboot the default, edit bootcmd as follows:

setenv bootcmd 'run sdboot ; echo ; echo sdboot failed ; run ubiboot ; echo ; echo ubiboot failed'
saveenv
3

Well, while untaring e.g. symbolic links and changing ownership to uid 0 gid 0 won’t work on FAT filesystems the basic file extraction should work just fine. However one will subsequently have to rename the kernel and device trees as indicated above (note that I fixed @brandon.tx’s commands in that respect). Other than that this should work just fine.

Concerning the error you are now seeing I guess it somehow skips failing sdboot and reverts to doing ubiboot which seems to fail due to no UBI device/partition being selected. What I find strange is that you do not get an explicit error message on the sdboot operation itself. Could you e.g. post the output as follows for us to see whether from U-Boot’s point of view your SD card is ready for SD boot?

Colibri iMX7 # mmc dev 0
switch to partitions #0, OK
mmc0 is current device
Colibri iMX7 # mmc part

Partition Map for MMC device 0  --   Partition Type: DOS

Part    Start Sector    Num Sectors     UUID            Type
  1     2048            102400          ebc4bbc3-01     0c
  2     104448          15460352        ebc4bbc3-02     83
Colibri iMX7 # ls mmc 0:1
     1819   flash_eth.img 
      638   fwd_blk.scr 
      710   fwd_blk.img 
    40257   imx7d-colibri-eval-v3.dtb 
     1827   flash_blk.scr 
   528384   u-boot-colibri-imx7-v2015.04-v2.6b2+gitautoinc+10bc451b69-r0.imx 
     1899   flash_blk.img 
      372   fwd_eth.scr 
    38890   imx7s-colibri-eval-v3.dtb 
      444   fwd_eth.img 
      123   mk-u-boot-scripts.sh 
     1747   flash_eth.scr 
  5113928   zimage 

13 file(s), 0 dir(s)

Colibri iMX7 # run sdboot
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The command sudo tar -C /media/user/BOOT/ -xvf~/Downloads/Colibri_iMX7_LinuxImageV2.6Beta2_20160630.tar.bz2 Colibri_iMX7_LinuxImageV2.6/colibri-imx7_bin --strip-components=2 don’t work with FAT filesystem.
I extract the file to temp dir and copy zImage, imx7d-colibri-eval-v3.dtb and imx7s-colibri-eval-v3.dtb to the SD card BOOT partition. When I run the command run sdboot I get error.

Colibri iMX7 # run sdboot
Booting from MMC/SD card...
Error, no UBI device/partition selected!
Colibri iMX7 #
5

My apologies for the incorrect DTB/kernel filenames. I may have referred to the wrong or outdated image tarball for this info. Refer to Marcel’s comment for the correct filenames.