Hello, all! I own a HiFive Premier Premier P550 and I want to update U-Boot to the latest upstream version. To cover my butt, I want to backup the old ROM in case of any troubles or difficulties I may run into. I own a CH341A SPI flash tool, and I recently tried to hook it up to the SPI flash ROM on the board and plug the device into a Raspberry Pi to read the contents of the chip to a backup in case if the update went poorly, I could also restore the original version. However, when I tried to hook it up to the Raspberry Pi, the flashrom utility was unable to recognize the SPI flash chip. Is there anything I can do about this? How do I ensure that I can use a secondary computer to read from and write to the flash chip? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!
@gjbauer, the procedure outlined in chapter-5 of the image update procedure is what I typically use to recover with eMMC corruption as Esburn downloads a bootloader into the SOC’s internal memory that then flashes the desired bootchain in eMMC.
I typically use a Linux host PC as Windows requires disabling the firewall that prevents Esburn on the host PC from communicating with the Premier P550 board, nonetheless I have flashed Premier P550 with Windows too.
I have also found that sometimes using the latest bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin with Esburn to download and run over USB causes failure so for the step in section 5.2.6 I use the bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin file from 2024 even though the bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin file flashed into the eMMC (configured in Esburn config file) is still the latest one.
Another point is that I configure the Esburn config file to only flash the bootloader and then restart the system with normal boot setting (0010) to flash the OS image as outlined in chapter-3 of image update procedure as it is much faster.