hi to all in this thread
ive successfully accessed the 1024MB on NAND ram on the switch
and found after a nandinfo, and nand bad cli
that the nand boot image has 3 bad blocks - which is why the switch wont boot
Devoce 0: NAND 1GiB 3,3V 8-bit, sector size is 128 KiB
Device 0 bad blocks:
039a0000
1068000
1424000
i have the commands to dump all the boot partitions and the NAND to TFTP server, ill examine, and compate that image to the one i have for mlnx-os. should be the same one.
then, format, copy the new .img to the switch (excluding the main u-boot one) and then set the Uboot boot partion to the NAND address. effectivley its a NAND hosted Boot image. AKA - RAM Disk Image. As its 284MB file it should fit in fine (image-PPC_M460EX-3.4.3002.img)
with any luck it will work.
Ive also figured out the .img file is created from the u-boot utilities
host% ./tools/mkimage -A sh -O linux -T ramdisk -a 0x8C800000 -n "ST40 Linux ramdisk" -d initrd.img /export/ramdisk.ub
im going to use the same to de-compile the image file to check the memory addresses match.
fingers crossed.