Unbricking IFC Boards

There are a couple of cases where you would encounter a bricked board and you would have to unbrick it. A board is usually deemed bricked if:

1. You can’t get to the bootloader (fastboot). This could happen when you modified the Linux kernel with a bug and you can’t reboot to fastboot mode since Android crashes on bootup.
2. You are switching between a Ubuntu image to an Android image.

To get into fastboot, simply follow the steps below:

Option A

1. Get a 8GB or larger SD card.
2. Navigate to the “Software” page after logging in at the Inforce Techweb http://www.inforcecomputing.com/techweb/
3. Find the latest SD Card Boot package that is provided and download it.
4. Extract the files to find a .bz2 file, and execute bzip2 -d sdcard_boot.img_880258_V1.0.bz2.
5. Insert the SD card and run dmesg to find which /dev/sdX (character device) the SD card is attached as.
6. Copy the output of Step 4 to the SD card by executing sudo dd if=sdcard_boot.img_880258_V1.0 of=/dev/sdX.
7. It will take about 40 minutes depending on the speed of the SD card. You can track the status of the dd command by executing sudo kill -USR1 [PID], where [PID] is found by executing pgrep -l ‘^dd$’.
8. Insert the SD card into the IFC6410 board and switch all DIP switches to ON position and power up the board. It should power up into fastboot.
9. While it’s in fastboot mode, flash the desired bootloader and optionally, the binaries as well. Don’t forget to remove the SD card and move the DIP switches back to OFF after flashing the board!!