GSM no longer registers on GTA02 - how to troubleshoot?

Daniel Dadap daniel at digsoc.com
Tue Dec 9 16:41:55 CET 2008


Hi everybody,

I have been using Freerunner as a daily phone for some months now, and
yesterday it suddenly stopped registering the GSM network. It was
working fine in the morning, sending/receiving SMS, making phone
calls, etc., then in the afternoon suddenly the phone portion was
completely dead. I restarted qpe (running Om2008.9) a few times, then
rebooted the phone, pulled out the battery and SIM and reseated
everything, etc., but got nowhere. When I got home, I reflashed a
couple of known good kernel/rootfs combinations, but got nowhere. I
even tried an FSO image, since it uses a different phoneserver, but it
didn't work either. I put my SIM into my old dumbphone (which is a
little bit broken, in that it only works on speakerphone) and it was
able to register with no problems.

How can I troubleshoot GSM registration to see at what point the
process is failing? I would hate for this to be a hardware problem,
but I don't know what to do when reflashing doesn't work.

I do have another issue, which I don't think is related: my NAND
u-boot seems to be borked. Whenever I boot the GTA02 without booting
it from the NOR u-boot, I get a scrambled image on the screen and the
device is frozen. Often, the scrambled image that appears is whatever
was in the framebuffer right before powering off. If I boot into NOR
u-boot, I can boot into the OS fine, but if I just try to turn it on
without holding down the AUX button or try booting into NAND u-boot, I
get a freeze. I've tried reflashing u-boot several times, but it
doesn't help. I download u-boot from downloads.openmoko.org and the
md5 sum of my u-boot image is 40b8f908649f78e7d70358239da96f98. Is
this a known good image? Why would u-boot fail after reflashing?

Is there a way to wipe out my entire NAND and reflash everything,
without a debug board? I know there is the lowlevel image, which
apparently requires a debug board to flash. I have no idea how my
u-boot got so screwed up or why restoring it doesn't help.

Any advice on either of these two problems (more importantly, GSM
registration) is much appreciated.



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