mrp | # 51 | 2007-02-07, 09:25 | Report

I have a 512 mmc, arranged to boot from mmc-80MB FAT rest for EXT2. Strange behaviour takes place with internettablettalk.com. All text appears in "lego blocks". Have tried with diferent encodings. Even formatted my ext2 and rearranged the mmc boot. same thing. If I boot from flash all texts are fine. Any ideas?

fanoush | # 52 | 2007-02-07, 10:10 | Report

Yes. https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=838

Or did you used GNU tar for cloning as suggested in every guide and it still happens?

mrp | # 53 | 2007-02-07, 10:56 | Report

unfortunately I did not know of the problem with rsync. Going to do it one more time, this time with tar. Thank you for your help,
Mika

BTW. Nokia has announces a revision for mediastreamer, including video streaming. Have not tried yet

jayholler | # 54 | 2007-02-16, 06:16 | Report

Does anyone have a bootmenu.conf file to share that works on the N800? I followed the instructions, got gnu/tar from penguinbait.com using wget, and cloned the entire system after making the appropriate partitions and formatting them, with the required reboots in between. The bootmenu works fine, but the system just hangs when trying to boot the file system from the SD card on /dev/mmcblk1 (and yes, I altered the examples in the appropriate places to indicate the appropriate card and directory). I don't understand what went wrong, but for now I gave up after mutliple attempts have failed. The only thing I didn't follow was that I had already installed a bunch of apps before doing this, so that might have screwed the pooch. I figure I'll give it another try next time I flash the system with a clean image. If anyone has any suggestions or anything, I'm all ears.

fanoush | # 55 | 2007-02-16, 17:44 | Report

can you post your not working entry?

Shouldn't matter, if it boots from flash then it should boot from mmc too. It is better to clone clean system since you have clean backup and you can be sure the system works but otherwise it doesn't matter.
Check if you have /dev/mmcblk1pX files in initfs. But not when system is already booted since /dev is overlayed with tmpfs filesystem. Remount initfs somewhere else and look into /dev/

Do you see device file for your boot device? If not, that's the problem.

fanoush | # 56 | 2007-02-16, 18:06 | Report

just had a look and partitions 1 and 2 are there for both cards

So unless you boot from /dev/mmcblk1p3 the problem is somewhere else

jayholler | # 57 | 2007-02-16, 18:41 | Report

Here is my bootmenu.conf file, to boot from mmcblk1p2, which is ext2. mmcblk1p1 is fat16, at 480MB.

I know that the menuID references mmcblk1p1, but this was after p2 failed to boot, I was hoping it would skip p1 and find the first bootable partition on the sd card, as per the README.txt.
For now I think I'll be giving up. I don't have mmcblk1 set up that way anymore, but I will post more on my next attempt. Thanks Fanoush!

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Last edited by jayholler; 2007-02-16 at 18:44.

fanoush | # 58 | 2007-02-16, 18:58 | Report

Maybe this is a little confusing in the README but it works like this only with the original 'mmc' root device. If you add your own with specific device nothing is searched or skipped. Did you try to remove 'defaults' and leave only noatime? Is the same card booting when inserted into internal slot (with different menu entry of course)?

jayholler | # 59 | 2007-02-16, 20:28 | Report

OK, I lied, I've been trying this again since you posted your response to my questions.

Here is the problem, it would seem that the card may be corrupted. But I have a few questions, please excuse my newbness for the rest of this post.

When using sfdisk, it says that if you make a DOS partition you need to

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk1p1 bs=512 count=1

Not being too familiar with sfdisk, I read up on it, and it appears that this is necessary. The man page I found online said to exit sfdisk, reboot, then issue the "dd" command above. So I tried that, but then the sfdisk program won't recognize the partitions, nor will mkdosfs or mke2fs. OK.

So, I tried next to only make one 2GB partition for ext2. So I sfdisk, reboot, mke2fs, reboot. Now I should be able to continue with "tar"ring the flash image over, following the instructions from the original post.

Next I do the ./initfs_flash script, reboot. I have modified the bootmenu.conf file to indicate mmcblk1 (since I only have one large linux partition now), and only the noatime option).

I try to mount /dev/mmcblk1p1, and there is nothing there.

sfdisk -l /dev/mmcblk1 says:

"sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/mmcblk1: unrecognized partition
No partitions found"

I am not sure where to go from here. I am using an N800, and trying to use the external MMC so I can still utilize the swap built into the OS on the internal MMC.

Do I have to use a DOS partition on /dev/mmcblk1? It would appear so. Perhaps I have a bad card, or messed it up somehow with all this partitioning from the device?

fanoush | # 60 | 2007-02-16, 21:05 | Report

Not sure if this is still needed. This is historic issue related to bug in old ms-dos format.exe and/or fdisk.exe commands. They were too clever and were confused by previous data in the partition. I guess you can skip it but it shouldn't hurt.

If it hurts then something is seriously wrong, did you really used /dev/mmcblk1p1 and not /dev/mmcblk1 with dd command?

This is not good idea, default Nokia system expects first partition on card being FAT, if you insist on this you will need to modify few things or it will complain or fail.
This is the problem, looks like partitioning by sfdisk somehow doesn't work for you (or you erased if via bad dd above). Can you repartition card in desktop linux via usb card reader?

You can use swap on internal card partiton 1 (FAT) and still boot from partition 2 (ext2) on same card. This is IMHO the best setup. Then you have external slot completely free for other cards.
Yes, I'd guess some problem with partitioning the card. Try also 'dmesg' command to see kernel log, if you don't see i/o errors card is probably not bad.