Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

I flashed it, but cannot get to a menu (on my N810). It boots up saying "hold menu for menu" or something, but when I hold the menu key, nothing happens, it just boots from internal flash. Help, please (I even edited bootmenu.conf)!

EDIT: Sorry, it says "press and hold menu for advanced" something or other.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Did you set the timeout to zero seconds?

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

No, I left it at the default 30.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Then it should give you a menu with a list of booting options (the ones you set in the config file) and timeout to your default after 30 seconds.

Did you perhaps mess up the number of menu entries?

Edit: Probably save some time if you just post the bootmenu.conf

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Haven't tried Fanoush's initfs (yet), but the simple things are sometimes the trouble. By menu key, I think it means the one on the slider below the d-pad? (IIRC they changed the names in Nokia's documentation for the N810, so I thought you might be confused as to which button is what...)
Don't know which button you're trying, and don't mean to imply you're an idiot or anything... but sometimes it's the easy stuff that bites us.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Here it is, edited the same way it is on the N810.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Unless your changes the .conf file were unable to be parsed, it should be ok.Hold down menu before you get the message.

What you can do is to run "chroot /mnt/initfs cal-tool --set-root-device ask:mmc1"

That will force the device to show the boot menu on each boot with it selected to boot of external card by default until timeout occurs.

Oh, yeah, copy your initfs.orig.jffs2 (something like that ) to the computer so that way, you can reflash initfs with flasher-3.0 if something messes up or you need to update your bootmenu.conf.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Hold down menu right after you get the message. Not sooner or it might get lost if you do it before kernel fully boots and initializes input subsystem.


Yes, that is the best solution if you don't want to play that hit and miss game at boot time. But after some practice you can hit it always. The idea was to not to slow down boot sequence so the message is shown as early as possible and check for key state is done as late as possible without introducing any wait state. That gives you about 1 second or so while dsme and bme starts and other system stuff is done, long enough when you expect it.

The 'ask' part does show menu always, the optional part after semicolon is default choice selected after (30s) timeout expires.

Yes, it is good to have it somewhere on your PC. Or you can later extract it from firmware image (flasher-3.0 -u -F .....bin). BTW, you can run the initfs flasher again to update bootmenu.conf, no need to restore original initfs. Just update bootmenu.conf and re-run the flasher. Just note that if done this way the installed/removed stuff won't magically uninstall/reappear so the yes/no questions about ssh, telnet etc. make no difference when run again.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Ah! Thanks :). I tried that but I was getting errors. I think something odd on my part. I kept restoring initfs when experimenting with text2screen :(

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

I can get to the menu and try to boot, but it hangs when "booting from /dev/mmcblk0p1" I assume the external SD would be /dev/mmcblk1p1? Do I need to change the "mmc1" to "mmc2" or something in the config file? I fixed it from the version posted here, BTW (that one still has ...mmcblk0p2 not p1).

Thanks for the help.

Re: Flashing Fanoush's initfs
 

Hello everyone,

some time ago, I used an automatic flasher to install the OS on internal memory card of my n810. Since then, every time I restarted the device I had to hold Menu and choose the partition from which I wanted to boot (now I learned I could change that using bootmenu file or something similar, but that is not the problem).

The problem I have now is, that I updated my OS2008 with the Application manager. I backed up my using the automated procedure. And now I don't see the boot menu anymore, so the device boots up to old OS.

I tried to fix that using the tutorial located at http://wiki.maemo.org/Booting_from_a_flash_card (the part with bootmenu), but I get an error when I try to flash the iinitfs_flash:

Are you sure to continue? (yes/no) : y
Create backup of current initfs (yes/no) : n
Part 1 - Preparing initfs.bootmenu.jffs2 image
*** copying current initfs ...mount: mounting /dev/mtdblock3 on mnt failed
done.
If you remove extra stuff you may write to initfs and customize bootmenu.
Remove unneeded extra (and factory testing) stuff? (yes/no) : n
!!! unknown initfs version 2008-43, cannot install bootmenu
Cannot find initfs.bootmenu.jffs2, something failed, nothing flashed.

I tried redownloading the initfs_flasher, reextracting, doing it with other options but nothing quite helps.

I would greatly appreciate it, if you would help me :)

P.S. Note that I'm not a linux guru ...