Yes, it always boots the NOR flash. Whatever I do, the NAND flash is never used.
In the meantime I managed to connect my AR300M over UART with my raspberry pi 3 on /dev/ttyAMA0. I still get some random garbage until But the output is very well readable. EDIT: After reading Ar150 Serial Boot and since I needed just read access to the uboot console, the garbage is no problem for me … so far.
[ 0.762872] console [ttyS0] enabled
is reached in the boot process. (Using the kermit config from Connection UART serial. Any hint about a possible cause would be much appreciated. )
Anyway, the console output show that uboot cannot see the NAND flash! Actually I get the same output for u-boot and printenv which @alpha1974 from the thread AR-300M broken? No nand flash gets. Btw his output also shows the wlf environment variable, but with a full command. I found that thread only after I raised my one. So sorry for this duplicate.
Not surprisingly the console also shows that flashing the NAND from the web UI fails because
Executing: nand erase; nand write 0x80800000 0 0xAA0000
no devices available
Could a newer u-boot version help? Could you kindly send me one? For @sportfreund from the same thread with the same problem a version from “May 16 2017 - 14:46:13” did not help. I found some remarks about attached u-boot versions in a few other threads but I cannot see these files.
Interestingly I readouted the NAND flash from the booted NOR via dd if=/dev/mtd7 of=my_file and the beginning matches the firmware\nand\clean\1.0\openwrt-gl-ar300m-ubi-clean.img. But that is probably only another issue I assume. Because the NOR was originally flashed with version 2.261 and my board revision is v1.4.0 with the PN26G01AWSIUG NAND chip.