Thanks dougw - I was hoping that I don;t have to get other hard pieces - at the moment I just have the usb and beagle but may now have to buy those stuff to get anywhere.
Dougw - I got the new micro SD and the power adapter but reading thru this article - to it means i now need an FTDI - USB cable - hmm to serial login to the system and then mount the contents of the sd to the eMMC . I have seen some videos that suggest insert the sd and then hold down the boot button to have the sd image flashed to the eMMc . Is that equivalent to the FTDI usb command line route or it just wouldn;t work?
You could also just ignore the eMMC and install purely on the micro SD card, and boot from that (I think you have to press a button on the board the first time you do that - I can't recall the detail). The BBB eMMC does not have a lot of storage space, it's not enough to house many decent full distributions. Granted you may not need a full sized distribution if you're focussed on embedded applications, or if your course demands it, but it does make life harder not having the comforts of various commonly-used apps resident on the board. I don't think I've used the BBB eMMC for ages, I assume it's not there and just go directly to microSD (for the rare times I use the BBB - I'd rather use the Pi nowadays). That's not the way for a commercially-shipping embedded Linux product of course, but then they typically have a small team just to prepare the distribution for the rest of the application.
Dougw - I followed the procedure but when trying to log into the board or get a prompt using putty - i got no prompt - I used the external power adapter to power the board ,flashed the image to the sd - got the com port via the ftdi cable - set it to 115200 ,ensure the 8 N1 was ok but no response .
A photo of your setup will help, in case anything can be spotted from it. If you can show how you've wired the 'ftdi cable' and also show what power supply you're using (a photo of the label on it) and also precisely what ftdi cable you're using.
