Installation fails on OMAP4/Pandaboard (RevA2)

[Winston Smith]

After performing a BRAND NEW installation of ubuntu-12.10-server-armhf+omap4.img on an OMAP4 Pandaboard (Rev A2), the system apparently completed the installation, the installer asked if it could reboot, I saw the "Requesting system restart" message and nothing further happened.

I then went to manually power cycle the unit, but it does nothing at all, I don't even see the u-boot messages coming up. The activity LEDs on the board also behave differently from a normal boot (STATUS1 comes on and stays lit, there is no other LED activity, including the Ethernet LEDs.

NOTE: That this behavior is exactly the same as when I tried to upgrade an existing 12.04 system to 12.10 (see bug #1076447)

If I mount the SD card on Mac OS X, and run the 'ls' command, it appears that the fat32 partition is corrupt or damaged:

mbp:~ winston$ ls -al /Volumes/SERVICEV001/
ls: MLO. ␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀剅䥖䕃ざ㄰t.biꤨ䅭: No such file or directory
total 28836
drwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 1536 Jan 1 1980 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 7 root admin 238 Nov 13 22:10 ..
drwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 512 Nov 13 17:49 .Spotlight-V100
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 winston staff 512 Nov 13 17:49 .Trashes
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 4096 Nov 13 17:49 ._.Trashes
drwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 512 Nov 13 22:10 .fseventsd
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 26960 Oct 17 18:28 MLO
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 72 Nov 14 2012 preEnv.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 39 Oct 17 18:28 preEnv.txt-old
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 97 Oct 17 18:28 preEnv.txt-serial
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 97 Nov 13 19:54 preEnv.txt.bak
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 119 Nov 14 2012 uEnv.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 119 Oct 17 18:28 uEnv.txt.bak
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 4276960 Nov 14 2012 uImage
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 4276960 Oct 17 18:28 uImage.bak
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 1853248 Nov 14 2012 uInitrd
-rwxrwxrwx 1 winston staff 4318492 Oct 17 18:28 uInitrd.bak

NOTE2: After writing the image to the SD card and before attempting to boot, you must replace preEnv.txt with preEnv.txt-serial otherwise there is no console and you cannot perform the installation (this is not documented that I could see!).