Building a Lite live USB with busybox installed for system repair
 

I’m working on an embedded system running a stripped down version of Linux 3.4.43. It has an Allwinner a13 processor and 128mb of RAM. It was developed off of an Olimex board from the best I can tell from my research. The board boots into Uboot and then the Linux kernel starts. After a short time it fails and cannot proceed any further. Upon connecting via serial, I can see that when it gets to mmcblk0p2, it fails. I am provided with the message that running fsck is recommended, at that point. But with the partition being mounted, I am unable to utilize Busybox to run fsck on the board. After speaking with others, it was recommended to build a bootable USB running only a rootfs with Busybox on it and then running fsck from there. The problem is that I am lost, as this is my first adventure into the world of Linux. I know I would be further ahead to just run a sbc with more power but, I’m a tinkerer and enjoy doing things to learn something. If anyone has any guides for dummies, I’d be appreciative of any assistance in getting this assembled. Thank you in advance, Chris

I'm not a developer however, I think that there might be an issue with the emmc module seeing as to the fact that you say that you got siad device second hand. I'm suspecting that the emmc(flash chip) has maybe come to its end of life nad there for may need to be replaced.

before you do the full on EMMC replacement I'd recommend that you try replacing the EMMC try booting the board off of a usb stic and running diagnostic tools like fsck and others,

That’s precisely what I’m trying to do. I may have just worded things incorrectly. I’m not trying to replace the Linux kernel, just trying to repair the system. I just don’t know how to build the usb stick to do what I need it to😂