Has anyone rewritten the MMC flash to USB?

[pete]

Curious if anyone out there has rewritten the MMC flash on a Joggler to a USB flash and booted from it rather than the Joggler?

[hawsey]

Think I asked this a while ago Pete and don't think it is possible :-/ it would be a great way of rescuing jogglers that only boot from usb.

[pete]

Thanks Gary.

Yup; playing here today with the EFI boot stuff. Trying to manually change the configuration such that it looks first at the EFI boot stuff on the USB then goes internal. So far its a manual thing and if I mess it up I reboot in xp mode; edit the efi boot stuff and start again.

[pete]

I was able to boot from a USB stick with the original MMC stuff on it; playing some.

Basically here is what I am doing:

1 - booting Buzz's Umbuntu build from the SSD card
2 - booting from the original MMC inside of the Joggler(2)
3 - booting from a copy of the O2 OS MMC from a USB stick

This is just sort of playing with the EFI stuff.

[gegs]

I was able to boot from a USB stick with the original MMC stuff on it; playing some.

Wow Pete! That's really good news. Would this be available as a bootable image for those less technical than yourself (almost everybody ) or would it require a bit of hardware/firmware/software hacking to run at all?

[pete]

Its sort of a major hack (a bit of a PITA) as I found statically configured to the MMC stuff in the boot EFI partition.

All this though was related to the Verizon working and configured Openpeak (joggler2) build versus the one that is a non configured one looking for the mothership. The fat boot EFI parition is totally different than the Joggler O2 boot EFI partition. Its got a bunch of built in stuff which it defaults to should the device not boot; recovery stuff; partly on the partition and partly from the mothership.

That said playing with this boot stuff. The Joggler O2 boot partition stuff appears simpler though. Basically though I am just DD'ing the MMC image over to a USB stick; then playing with the still intact boot EFI MMC partition and the USB EFI boot partition. The boot 1Mb EFI flash piece though looks like it always looks (hard coded) first to the MMC boot partition. IE: The rewrite of the EFI to Seabios flash changed that such that it doesn't rely on the MMC for booting.

I'm afraid that I have gone a bit far now into the "rabbit hole" and need to step away for a bit of time...this is though leading to a modification of the EFI boot flash on the removable 1Mb flash chip.

[gegs]

...this is though leading to a modification of the EFI boot flash on the removable 1Mb flash chip.

I thought it sounded too good to be true

[pete]

Yup totally in the Joggler2 "mode" for a few hours; rewrite, write edits, rewrite, boot, remove flash, boot again, rewrite, so forth and so on (learned that I did get faster as it became very repetitive) ....BUT when I wiped out the EFI fat boot partition on the MMC drive; it would just sit with nothing to do.....until I replaced the "bios" boot flash manually...

[hawsey]

http://jogglerhacks.blogspot.co.uk/2010 ... r.html?m=1

[pete]

Great stuff there Gary!

Thank you for the link!

I am confusing myself with this as I "think" the SSD is FS0 when its plugged in and the MMC is FSO when it is not plugged in while concurrent the boot rom may not be able to tell the difference?

[pete]

I increased the size of the first EFI boot paritition on the MMC some. Well went from around 60 to 250 Mb as there are some 4 subdirectories in it today with various boot set ups and I ran out of space yesterday playing with this. Going to try three boot setups with the EFI stuff; IE: the MMC, SSD or the USB stuff. I have enough room on the SSD to divide it up to multiple boot partitions which might work even better.

[pete]

Wow!

The EFI boot stuff worked! Weird in the early days of playing I could never get the keyboard EFI stuff to work.

Today it worked with the first boot configuration stuff.

Now trying to get it to boot in the original MMC O2 stuff.

I can get it to boot fine to the SSD and do see three icons if I plug in the USB.

Note that I am not sure which is the FS0 partition; the Ubuntu SSD or the MMC boot.

Current startup.nsh file reads:

fs2:boot
fs1:boot
fs0:grub

changed it to:

fs2:boot
fs1:grub
fs0:boot

Still having an issue booting into the O2 stuff; but no issues booting into Ubuntu. Going to change the order though such that the Ubuntu SSD boots by default with the 2ndary icon being the O2 boot.

Maybe I am not waiting long enough. I have startup.nsh set for three lines: FS0:, FS1: and FS2. All of the boot except for one which is grub. Maybe I should change fs1 to grub and fs0 to boot?

I want to subdivide the 16 Gb SSD device to two OS partitions to try booting into a pure XBMC partition or the Ubuntu partition.

Expanding from 60 to 250 mb didn't work well as I see 250 Mb but only can utilize 60Mb. Probably need to remove the partition, reformat it to EFI boot then copy over the files.

expanded 60 to 250 efi boot but still sees only 60 Mb.

EFI directory for booting

GRUB configuration file

Refit configuration file

[pete]

Now I am stuck and want to figure this out before moving on.

Why can't I boot anymore to the original MMC firmware?

I am doing something wrong here with this configuration. Wondering if I should just make the fs stuff all go to "boot" and not utilize "grub"?

I have two grub.cfg files now.

One in the root efi directory:

loadfont /unicode.pf2
terminal_output gfxterm
set timeout=5
menuentry "Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise) - 3.2.32joggler1" {
set root=(hd0,1)
linux /vmlinuz-3.2.32joggler1 root=/dev/sda3 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-3.2.32joggler1
}

and another different one in the \efi\tools directory. (BTW it looks wrong)

timeout=5
default=0

menuentry "Linux-custom" {
root=(hd0,2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-6 root=/dev/sda2 ro acpi=force
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-6

should I copy the one from the root directory over to the \efi\tools directory?

The second one appears to be wanting to load linux from the MMC drive where it is not present; rather its the O2 firmware there.

Now I am thinking that I do not need a grub.cfg at all in the tools subdirectory as the O2 should just boot with the efi.boot thing. Will rename it to see what happens when it doesn't load.

It still doesn't load the original OS on the MMC. Next removed the SSD to see what happens with the EFI Refit boot.

Reconfiged the grub.cfg file in the efi tools directory to the following (it still doesn't work).

timeout=5
default=0

menuentry "Joggler O2" {
root=(hd0,2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz root=root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 ro acpi=force
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-6

I do not have the above bold/italics file in the root directory though but do have initrd so changed it to read:

initrd /boot/initrd

[pete]

Still having issues with the booting of the internal MMC and SSD OS's with two EFI menu items.

I did run out of space with the 60Mb parition and multiple subdirectories; such that said endeavor will now be shrinking one or two of the EXT partitions and creating a new 250 Mb EFI boot partition allowing for a bit more play space. My initial efforts show a 250Mb EFI partition but only let me save up to 60Mb of space. I figured it will be easier to just create a new 250Mb EFI boot parition from scratch.

That said though now splitting the small 16 Gb SSD drive to two OS's. I may try an XBMC only partition to see how it works. I can use a grub to multiboot or EFI boot this way.

Then maybe an XP or Android partition. (also thinking of going to a small 32Gb or 64Gb SSD drive to be able to do just a bit more).

[gegs]

Thanks for sharing your stuff with us Pete. I don't comment much on your posts but I read them avidly. Fascinating stuff!

[pete]

Here's a quickie rEFIi picture of what the Joggler 2 can do once using an SSD drive.

[hawsey]

Here's a quickie rEFIi picture of what the Joggler 2 can do once using an SSD drive.

Pete this looks great , really want a Joggler 2 now lol ,have you had a mess around with refit on a joggler 1 ? I would love to triple boot , Mint , xp, xbmc os . or maybee more all loaded on an external hdd and booting like you have here .
good work pete :-)

Sent from my BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps using Tapatalk 2 Beta-5

[pete]

Been playing with the refit.conf file to change the order of the boot sequence.

The base on the Joggler 2 that I am playing with is the currently posted FW update for the Joggler 1.

Lately though have updated all of the original Jogglers running XP with Asix USB network dongles. They are truely USB 2.0 and I have much less problems. That said every flavor of Linux runs fine with the internal Gb network card.

Two working network devices provide the ability to create a firewall entity which in turn provides a touchscreen interface. (keep going off on these tangents....)

I have changed the base HW though to utilizing the SSD ZIF Pata devices; such that they are all the same.

An FYI just noticed the sticker on the back of the Joggler 2 saids:

Prototype - never noticed that.