Topic: ANTMINER S2 Discussion and Support Thread - page 149. (Read 355730 times)

In light of newfound competition, i'm happy to announce my Customer Loyalty Program.  Buy 10 hours of support, get one free.  That's right - 11 hours of Skype where you're forced to look at my face.  A bargain.

Question for people with Batch 2 units: 

{{Edit: Turns out this is not a question so much as a series of questions, statements, and then a vague request for your input near the end.  Just fyi.}}

Earlier in the thread it seems like a lot of Batch 1 owners were reporting issues with the unit losing all (or some) config data upon reboot.  (I think the gist was that some people just had EVERYTHING overwritten/reset, and others were just losing specific parts of their customizations, like IPs and changes to initscripts or passwords, etc.)  Are Batch 2 units showing this same problem?  If not, then do we know if that's because the new firmware fixed the problem...or if it's just magic...or if it's just that not enough Batch 2 units are out there yet to know for sure?


The reason I ask, is I was looking at the Beagle Bone Black (the embedded device that's always exactly 1 slip of the tongue away from like, 3-4 different probable titles for porn films, but I digress) wiki and I found something that *might* be germane to the discussion:


I don't have one of these in front of me to toy with, but going by what others were saying I got the impression that the -- how should I phrase this -- "the cost-reduced, simplified BBB version" being used by Bitmain in the S2 units lacks any eMMC/internal memory...so it doesn't have any choice but to boot off the SD card each time...so if it's running the 3.8 kernel, could this be the reason why people are having trouble getting certain changes to "stick?"

Just an educated guess, here, but following the same logic -- could this also explain perhaps why a number of people have reported success fixing various problems, by replacing the (Bitmain) S2 BBB with their own spare/OEM/Official version --  ie, one that has all the parts one would expect a BBB to have, including internal memory...?   

Apologies if this is just way off course and not useful to anyone troubleshooting the matter; I was just trying to "think aloud" on what might or might not be causing that issue...  Perhaps replacing the cheaper/stock BBB with a standard/OEM BBB might be a potential "upgrade" worth considering for people with special needs, like those who *know* they are going to run stuff on a different subnet and use SSH keys and ...I don't know, need the system to play Ms Pac Man on the display or something. :)

And I think I just realized -- there are either 8 questions in there, or none...  Not quite the "one question for Batch 2 owners" that I advertised above.  Sorry about that...  Need more caffeine, talking a bit too much in "stream of consciousness" format, I'm afraid!

So I'll cheat and use the generic question: 

          "So, Batch 2 owners:  Any thoughts regarding any of this?" 

haha, there, I've condensed everything to one question vague enough that anyone can "interpret it for themselves" and answer it in some form or fashion.  :)



PS,  just so this post adds some actual 'value' to the discussion instead of just vague questions about things I may or may not actually know anything about, for the people discussing the SD card image and its filesystem/partition structure (around 5-8 posts ago), here's the breakdown/sizes of the 3 partitions (with thanks to the kind individual who provided the image):



Anyway, ... for those who were asking what sizes and how many partitions to look for on their SD cards, ... um...there you go!

Note, for your convenience, all readers and posters to this thread have automatically been invoiced for the 407 hours it took me to generate the data, above.  You're welcome.  And no worries: I bill out WELL BELOW any competitor's price (at a mere $49.9999998051 an hour) so I'm basically just giving it all way for free, you lucky freeloading helpful-as-hell community of bastards! :)

I'm so glad the S1 doesn't have the problem of corruption and a bricked miner after a power recycle. What a pain.

Please fix this in future batches of the S2, Bitmain!

i've never had an S2 boot up with blue lights on the BBB board and ip showing on it's LCD, and then NOT be able to ping it.  seems contradictory. 

Are you sure you've eliminated the physical reasons that may cause this?  for example, if you disconnect the ethernet cable and your S2 will continue to display it's IP as 192.168.1.99.  Its up to you to confirm your switch, ethernet cabling and LAN are in working order.

Does the BBB ethernet activity lights light up?  how about the ethernet switch?

can you ping it by the ip shown on its screen?

if not, perhaps the problem is the little ethernet pigtail inside the box connecting the BBB board to the case outlet. 

Try bypassing it - plug the BBB directly into your ethernet switch.

Thanks for your support !

So just as a recap, the steps you need to take if your SD card gets corrupted and a simple reset on the front control panel won't resolve it:

1) Power off your Antminer
2) Take out the control board.  On the back of where the ethernet cable plugs into you will see a MicroSD card, remove it.
3) Take MicroSD card out and put it in a SD card adapter to insert into a laptop or 5-in-1 card reader
4) Download The bitmain.img from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16075357/bitmain.img.zip  (Courtesy of l1l1l1l1) as well as Win32DiskImager-0.
5) Use Win32DiskImager-0.exe to mount SD cards as an "image-able" device.  SD cards do not inherently accept images with default Imager software.
6) Image the Bitmain.img to image to your SD card.
7) Once done, plug it into your miner, make sure your ribbon cable is plugged into the main board nice and snug, and fire it up!

You should be done short of re-configuring your miner.  Remember that this resets it back to 192.168.1.99.  The image used does not work for me by default, so I had to "reset to default" with the front bottom-left button and reconfigure my settings.

If anyone wants a video demo of this I would be happy to make one if someone thinks it would help.  Cheers!

If you see only 60Mb use SDFormatter.

It will help.

I think you should give the re-image as suggested a try. SD card is NOT only 66.5mb, as someone else has mentioned the device gets partitioned up and what you are seeing is one of the partitions, i see the same thing too in windows for some reason, it only shows me the 60-something partition. If your on windows look at the disk manager on your laptop with the SD card in to see what im referring to, you will see all of the partitions . I purchased a brand new card which was initially showing 16gb free. After flashing it as per 111's instructions i can see it got partitioned up and windows will only show you the 66.5 size when viewing it after. Please give it a try.

It is assigned a static ip of 192.168.1.99.  It does not grab an IP via DHCP, so you won't see it in your router's DHCP table until you successfully connect to the S2's web gui and change it to DHCP.  Apologies if this sounds overly basic, but just to be clear, you can't access 192.168.1.99 unless the rest of your LAN is in the 192.168.1.x subnet.  Is that the case?

The SD card is not 66.5Mb.  The first PARTITION is 66.5mb.  You need to wipe out all 3 partitions, freeing up all 2gb of space, THEN write the image.
Quite honestly, I did it with a Mac using Disk Utility.  I'm sure the process is quite similar using the volume manger of Windows.  But if you just reference the drive letter of the first partition, you will only see 66.5mb

I imaged this with your image, but I can't see it grabbing an IP on my network now... any ideas?

Edit:  For whatever reason all I needed to do was reset it.  If you run into this problem, hold down the bottom left button with a safety pin or something for 3 seconds!

You have to write the image to the SD card with Windisk32 (aka windiskimager).

Cheers

what diff per worker must have ?
1024 or more?

For whatever reason it's either got a different user/pass or different IP or something. A sure way to get it to the right IP/user/pass would be to image the microSD card with my image.

From what I can tell, the SD card is only used to load up the OS, once it's there it runs from memory. so removing the microSD card before powering off is definitely a way to keep it from getting corrupted (again and again and again)

The disk image I made is of the entire microSD card, thus the entire 2GB card, including free space. You'll want to download win32diskimager and flash the entire image to the microSD card.

You'll want to download win32diskimager. Unzip the image file, then select it in diskimager, then choose your SD card (you'll want to get a micro SD usb card reader) then click "write device" it then writes the whole image to the microsd card and there ya go, drop it back in the S2

Pics of the controller were posted earlier by me, you'll have to dig in my post history to see 'em. If the SD card is corrupt the unit won't boot, and you won't see the bright blue LEDs on the BeagleBone Black card.

Yes.  $50 and i'll tell you.









no, i'm not that douchy.  The SD get partitioned into 3 pieces.  boot, boot backup and unused.  first two are about 70mb.  third is whatever is left on the card.
i've used 2gb, 8gb and 32gb successfully.