[ARMedslack] A perplexing Raspberry Pi problem and my workaround. Comments?

[Rob Clark]

First, let me thank Stuart Winter and the other contributors for
Slackware ARM on the Raspberry Pi.

My problem:
I am fortunate to have two RPi boards of nearly sequential serial
numbers to play with.  I had absolutely no trouble booting and
installing Slackware ARM on _one_ of them, but they other hangs on boot,
either with the rainbow screen, or no video output at all.

Debian-wheezy and Arch Linux from the raspberrypi.org site both work on
both boards.

The problem is the same booting from either the installation image
raspi-slack-installer-01Aug12.img.xz or on a fully installed Slackware
ARM made on the working RPi.  It boots on one device, but not the other.

I tried different SDHC cards, power supplies, keyboards, etc. to no
avail.  Switch everything to the other RPi, and it works fine.

My workaround:
Based on something I read on the Raspberry Pi troubleshooting forum, I
copied the start.elf and loader.bin from debian-wheezy to the first
partition of the raspi-slack-installer-01Aug12.  Now I am able to boot
on the balky RPi.

This is dumb luck because I charged ahead without understanding the boot
process on ARM.  So I offer this information, for whatever it's worth :)