O2 Joggler vs OpenPeak Joggler and USB stick compatibility

[tangye]

Long time listener, first timer caller....

First up, so much respect for you guys in what you have managed to achieve with the Joggler. You guys rock.

Ok, so I have 2 Jogglers, one boots natively via the O2 startup screen, the other natively via the OpenPeak startup screen. If I burn an img file to a USB stick, regardless of the operating system I am trying to run - be it Android (both the 1.2.3 and the 1.2.4 version), Ubuntu or the various XP / Win2003 versions currently available, it ALWAYS works without fail on the OpenPeak version - first time, everytime, but always fails on the O2 version 95% of the time. I'm using a HP v165w 8gb USB stick - one which I bought because various people had mentioned that they have had success with it.

I have tried every possible connotation of wiping and writing the various image files to the USB sticks - Win32DiskImager versions 0.1 and 0.3, WinImage, USB Boot Tool, MiniTool Partition Wizard, HDD Low Level Format Tool ... etc, but the O2 joggler just won't boot reliably. I think it has booted twice - once the Android 1.2.4 image and once the Win 2003 image. But on both occasions, when I rebooted the device, the images failed to reload.

Both Jogglers have PnP installed, but other than that, I haven't pimped them at all.

Any ideas?


The annoying thing is that

[tangye]

Please disregard the last line saying "the annoying thing is that"

[Mevi]

when you say it fails on the O2 Joggler... is it sticking on the O2 logo, is the stick access light lighting up, that kind of thing. I don't have any Openpeak Jogglers, just the O2 ones. If it's sticking on the O2 logo, try perhaps doing this with a keyboard and stick on a hub...

Hi. I've recovered my joggler. Seems the EFI was still good. All that i needed to do to boot through USB was 1. Hit ESC repeatedly after power up to get to the efi shell
2. Blindly type "fs0:" <enter> "boot.nsh" <enter>

I then used dwl99's nuclear option to do a clean install. Many thanks to dwl99 and roobarb for helping to save my joggler.

Cheers

Lee

If you can boot off a stick with that method, head over to birds with wires and download the joggler reflash tool.

[tangye]

Thanks for responding Mevi. The O2 logo does comes up. The light on the USB stick flashes on and off maybe 10 times over the course of about 20 seconds when the Joggler is rebooted, then just stays on. If I don't put a USB stick in the Joggler it does boot up to the native OS just fine. Do you think a reflash using the Birds With Wires tool would allow the Joggler to boot successfully from a USB stick?

[danfoshizzle]

Your efi could be a little corrupted, would suggest using roobarbs reflash tool found on birds like wires

[Mevi]

The reflash tool does depend on the Joggler booting from a stick.. It's really ubuntu server with a script to flash from an img file. If hitting escape and typing the boot commands doesnt work, are you able to telnet into the Joggler? You can flash the firmware from the command line. I've been fortunate enough not to need them, but the instructions are somewhere on the site.

[pete]

Yes; before reading about roobarbs flash tool; I had trashed my Joggler boot EFI and just did the telnet command thing rewriting the flash and it worked fine. I still could never get to an EFI prompt though hitting the esc key with my keyboard trying numerous USB keyboards. Maybe it was me and the keyboards that I was using.

[tangye]

Thanks for your replys. I massively appreciate that you all took the time to respond. Anyway, the missus is out tonight for her "book club" Christmas party, the kids are in bed, so it's time to reflash the joggler. I'll let you know how it goes.

[tangye]

As per the instructions on the "birds like wires" website, I burned the image to a USB stick, copied the script and the OpenPeak O2 image to the reflash folder, inserted it into the Joggler, rebooted, but I am stuck on the following screen.

What should I do next? Should I try a different USB stick, or perhaps try attaching a keyboard via a USB hub and do the "Hit ESC repeatedly after power up to get to the efi shell and then blindly type "fs0:" <enter> "boot.nsh" <enter>" trick?

Any thoughts or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[roobarb!]

As per the instructions on the "birds like wires" website, I burned the image to a USB stick, copied the script and the OpenPeak O2 image to the reflash folder, inserted it into the Joggler, rebooted, but I am stuck on the following screen.

What should I do next? Should I try a different USB stick, or perhaps try attaching a keyboard via a USB hub and do the "Hit ESC repeatedly after power up to get to the efi shell and then blindly type "fs0:" <enter> "boot.nsh" <enter>" trick?

You won't need to do the 'hitting ESC' bit - your Joggler has already booted, so you're past that hurdle.

What's happened there is that the kernel has been loaded, but for some reason it's not then continuing to boot from the stick. I would wonder if your Joggler just doesn't like that stick for some reason. BTW, using the reflash tool won't cure this - it only rewrites the internal 1GB flash and doesn't touch the EFI flash memory. From the looks of things, I don't think you have an EFI issue. If you've got a small (1GB or larger) alternative USB stick around, try using that to run the reflash tool (but turn off your Joggler before the reflash starts, unless you really want to start from scratch with the native OS).

[tangye]

Roobarb - thanks for that - you saved me a lot of time.

I guess I'll go back to square one again and try every combination of partition manager and image burner with each USB stick and see if I can find a combination that works. Do you think that using XP for the partitioning / img burning would have any affect on whether a USB stick would boot? Is there any chance results would be different if I was using either Ubuntu or the Gparted CD instead?

Also, does anyone know if there is some sort of a tiny "test img" available that could be used to test whether a USB stick will boot successfully? I guess all it would need to do is load the kernel, continue to boot from the USB stick, then display some sort of message that the boot from the USB stick was successful? It would save a lot of time burning this cut down image to a stick to test, as opposed to burning a large OS. Just a thought.

[matbro51]

I wonder if there might be different EFI versions, even between 'O2' branded Jogglers as I have never been able to get a Windows build to boot with any USB sticks I have, while Ubuntu/Adnroid builds are fine (Annoying as I want to try Skype under Windows as it has support for my USB Camera/MIC.) Is there a way to 'flash' to a known EFI version, or is that risky?

The best I can get is:

Code: Select all

 +fs1:boot> fs0oj-ntlr
'fs0oj-ntlr' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file

Is there a way to compare/report EFI version numbers?

[tangye]

Apologies, but I wanted to bump this topic back to the top of the list. I'm still unable to get the O2 joggler to boot of a USB stick, while the OpenPeak joggler boots off the same USB stick every time.

Anyone have any ideas on what I could try to fix the O2 joggler?

[BuZz]

Could be a corrupted efi. I could give you an efi image from my O2 joggler if you wanted to try flashing that from within built in os.

[tangye]

Buzz, I'd be keen to try, but unfortunately have no idea how to reflash the efi. Is there a guide somewhere that would point me in the right direction?

[manxam]

There's a writeup on how to write the EFI on the wiki: http://www.jogglerwiki.com/wiki/Recover ... ricked_EFI

And a link to a working EFI from one of mine: http://db.tt/xt1x4izY (right click -> save as...)

[BuZz]

I edited your link to point to jogglerwiki.com - the wiki lives on the same domain as this forum! - you linked to the .info address that is not a lot of use anymore - see http://bliterness.blogspot.com/2010/11/ ... moved.html

[manxam]

Sorry Buzz, I just googled it. I wondered why there were SO many adds on the pages. I didn't notice that it was the old site. Any chance you could host the efi file on the wiki so no one has to look for it?

[BuZz]

I'll sort something else. First of all, after just looking at yours/my efi dump, why does the start contain some "dmesg" log data from my linux builds. A feature of the efi keeping some data buffered there, or a bug with something writing to the wrong place? I assume it is a feature, else we would all have non working jogglers very quickly, but I'd like to find out.

[BuZz]

Does look like the last part of dmesg is in a NVRAM Variable or something. I shall read more on this, as I would think writing often to the nvram isn't a good thing. Maybe some kernel config I can change.