May 5, 2024

Antminer S9 board - SD card boot and a BAD board

Today 3 boards arrived. Two from AliExpress, one was an Ebay buy (that shipped out of China). Price for the AliExpress boards was $26 per board with free shipping. The Ebay board was $32 with free shipping. It was described as a "NEW" board. I made a low offer and it was accepted.

See the end of this page for the conclusion -- the board is bad and I send it back (although the board shipped from China it is going back to an address in Texas). As long as it goes somewhere and doesn't clutter this place up any more.

First signs of trouble

The board shows nothing on the serial console when powered up! The lights look OK, I have not checked power supply voltages, but my theory is that is simply has no software installed and it is truly a NEW board. (This theory is probably wrong, but who knows).

Set up an SD card

I get a 16G SanDisk card and remove it from packaging. That in itself is challenging, but I manage with some persistence and don't cut myself as so many do. I have been told that cards bigger than 16G will not work.

Now exactly what board do we have? Nowhere does it call itself an "S9". The PCB shows "MINER AntMiner_ControlBoard_SC7Z010_V1.3".
A sticker says "Model: Ctrl C4I Vers:1.30".

I go to the download site. select "BTC/BCH/BSV SHA256" and "ANTMINER S9" and "Firmware" The top entry is dated "2019-08-08" and 41.47M in size.
I download: 

Antminer-S9-xilinx-201907311618-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF-sig.tar.gz
They also offer a "TF Card Service Pack", which I download also: 
'S9 SD card recovery image for C5 control board.7z'
I rename this to S9_recovery_image.7z to get rid of all the darn spaces. It is 128M in size. I need 7za to deal with it. 
su
dnf install p7zip
z7a l S9_recovery_image.7z
z7a x S9_recovery_image.7z
I end up with S9-20160607-recovery-sd.img 
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 3904897024 Jun  6  2016 S9-20160607-recovery-sd.img
Almost a 4G file.

I shove my blank SD card into a card reader and plug it in. Linux shows me: 

/dev/sde1 on /run/media/tom/6430-6332 type vfat
umount /dev/sde1
dd if=S9-20160607-recovery-sd.img of=/dev/sde bs=16M
After this we look at the disk: 
fdisk /dev/sde
Disk /dev/sde: 14.84 GiB, 15931539456 bytes, 31116288 sectors
Device     Boot   Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sde1          2048  616448  614401  300M  b W95 FAT32
/dev/sde2        616449 3074049 2457601  1.2G 83 Linux
/dev/sde3       3074050 3094530   20481   10M a2 unknown
root@trona:/u1/home/tom# mount /dev/sde1 /mnt
root@trona:/u1/home/tom# cd /mnt
root@trona:/mnt# ls -l
total 7584
drwxr-xr-x 2 tom tom    8192 May 25  2016  bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom   17711 Feb  1  2016  soc_system.dtb
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 4244820 Apr 22  2016  soc_system.rbf
drwxr-xr-x 2 tom tom    8192 Mar  2  2016 'System Volume Information'
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom     229 Feb  1  2016  u-boot.scr
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 3459944 Feb  1  2016  zImage
This just doesn't look right. There ought to be a BOOT.BIN file if we expect the Zynq bootrom to have anything to do with this.

Boot jumpers

We have 4 of these (very handy) near the SD card slot and serial header. With the jumper to the left it is set to 1, to the right it is set to 0.

Here is how I find them set with the card configured for NAND boot: 

JP4 - MIO5 bm0  0   right
JP3 - MIO3 bm1  0   right
JP2 - MIO4 bm2  1   left
JP1 - MIO2 bm3  0   right

Here is how we need them for SD boot: 

JP4 - MIO5 bm0  1   left
JP3 - MIO3 bm1  0   right
JP2 - MIO4 bm2  1   left
JP1 - MIO2 bm3  0   right

I change the jumpers for SD boot, insert the card, power up, and wait. Nothing on the console. Instructions say to wait 90 seconds and the red/green LED should blink. I wait 5 minutes: they never do.

I set the jumpers back to NAND boot -- the card will acts dead, i.e. no messages on the serial port.

I fool around some more, finding BOOT.bin and copying it to the VFAT partition on the card. My Ebay board still doesn't do anything.

Finally I get this idea. I try my SD card in a known good board. It works! I get output from the FSBL and U-boot, then U-boot fails because it can't find the kernel -- just what you would expect. Then I put that SD card into my Ebay board and I get nothing at all. I submit a return, put the board back in a box, print a label and am done with it.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org