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.

Did you set the timeout to zero seconds?

No, I left it at the default 30.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.