I hate to ask, but I guess I gotta - I was able to get the bootmenu-installer onto my n800 yesterday (it was dual booting until the recent os update trashed it, suddenly, no access to the internal sd, back to booting from flash, which has issues as I will relate). I tried installing bootmenu-installer from my documents folder, but it just says unable to install. I really need it to work because I just recently discovered this n800 which I recently bought used does not have a lock code I can use (11345 doesn't work, I emailed the guy who sold it but his also fails). I have plenty of room on the internal card but the flash is down to like 10 megs free.
Is virtual memory turned on, if so turn it off
Is bootmenu-installer or install-tools installed? If so uninstall them first
How many SD cards are inserted? Only one SD card can be inserted in the 800 when installing or it will fail.
These are the usual gotcha's
you might also try removing some package if you are low on space. 10mb is pretty tight
Yes, it will, although the bootmenu is then gone, so you'd better have some way of booting to reinstall the bootmenu.
And if you want to update both SD and flash, the best routine seems to be
Boot to SD
Update
When it reboots, it'll come to flash (because no bootmenu)
Update
When it reboots, it'll come to flash again
Install bootmenu.
On reboot, you'll have options as expected...
However, my setup is more complicated than that, and I use Fanoush's package independently, so I'm unable to say I've done exactly that.
This is what I did (using initfs_flasher directly, not bootmenu package) and it worked fine. But it does seem risky:
If the old user space can't work with new kernel and initfs, step 3 will result in non-booting system.
The safest way is to update flash first, so you have lower risk of that.
Many thanks to you guys, it was install-tools that was stopping me; I did not even have to remove my external sd card. I have now rebooted from mmc2 so I again have plenty of room (I gave ALL of a 2 gig SD card except 128 meg to the boot OS).
Now, if I could just figure out why the code the previous owner (lock code) won't work, I could reset the original flash to original state and start it over. Just damn glad your bootmenu installer in on the flash though, I was wrong about the 10 megs, it still has 15 available! Thanks!
This is what I did (using initfs_flasher directly, not bootmenu package) and it worked fine. But it does seem risky:
If the old user space can't work with new kernel and initfs, step 3 will result in non-booting system.
The safest way is to update flash first, so you have lower risk of that.
OTOH, that requires installing the boot menu (or using flasher-3.0 to set the boot device) to boot off the SD again, then SSU that way, and finally install the boot menu again.
If you update SD, and it will not boot back into flash because of some boot-stopping incompatibility (which should be quite rare), you can still use flasher-3.0 to set the default boot device as mmc, provided your SD is laid out appropriately.
Where can I find some docs for bootmenu? I'm just looking to change which menu option is the default...
boot to flash and open xterm and become root and run the following command:
chroot /mnt/initfs cal-tool –set-root-device ask:flash
Instead of flash, you can also set the default boot image to be mmcX
mmc2 is partition 2 on internal
mmc3 is partition 3 on internal
mmc12 is partition 2 on external
mmc13 is partition 3 on external
You guys have made this an ever better device. However, it seems that, after spending all my time installing apps in the SD boot partition, if I use the SSU update that will trash my SD boot. Is it as simple as reinstalling the boot menu? If I have to update flash, then clone to the SD card, won't I have to reinstall everything again? This, to me, seems like it defeats the purpose of SSU. Am I just missing something here?
Edit: 10/20/08
Ok, you can disregard this. I think, after re-reading Benson's post a couple more times, his procedure makes sense to me now. It sounds like I only have to reinstall bootmenu, not install tools. I have a backup, so even if this doesn't work, I can clone again and restore. Thanks again.
