Greetings nokia n900 owners.

I'm planning on obtaining a nokia n900 and doing some fun things with it.

My question is in regards to the USB mass storage device mode and the partitions that are accessible when the device is in the mass storage mode.

Is the whole internal SD accessible by default in the mass storage mode? Or can you only see 1 partition?

Is the nokia n900 when in mass storage mode and connected to your computer, viewable in the BIOS as a possible device to boot off of?

How hard would it be to setup a partition on the n900 that could be used to boot an operating system on a computer while using the mass storage device mode?
(without bricking the n900 and deleting/reformatting the partition that maemo is on)

Thanks for any replies.

Root filesystem is not available when in mass storage mode. Not tried booting an OS from it but I would think it requires an NTFS filesystem dependant on the folder tree size and individual filesize but the N900 is vfat and not NTFS.

The "enable USB mass storage script" only makes 1 partition available by default (the 27 GB vFAT MyDocs partition) from the eMMC memory. The swap and home (ext3) partitions on the 32 GB eMMC are in use by Maemo normally so they can't be unmounted.

But the microSD card is also automatically made available and I have in the past used it to install Linux Mint on my PC or to make a backup using clonezilla.

If you install backupmenu you can mount all partitions through USB on your PC. But you can alter the partition table on the eMMC and also alter the normal Maemo "enable USB mass storage script". You can even mount a loopback image file through USB if you want. (most likely the easiest way to boot an image from the eMMC memory, but that isn't very fast)

The community wiki has a lot of information.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Repartitioning_the_flash
And information about using an loopback image for USB:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...9&postcount=68

"Root filesystem is not available when in mass storage mode. Not tried booting an OS from it but I would think it requires an NTFS filesystem dependant on the folder tree size and individual filesize but the N900 is vfat and not NTFS."

What are you talking about? I have a vfat formatted flash drive with multiple OSs on it and I'm able to boot from it just fine.

Thanks for the replies.

"But the microSD card is also automatically made available and I have in the past used it to install Linux Mint on my PC or to make a backup using clonezilla. "

So is it safe for me to assume, that if you have an SD card in the n900, and if you have the n900 attached to your computer through a usb port and usb mode enabled, that your bios will be able to see the SD card through the n900?

This would be very handy, especially for computers that do not have sd card readers.

Also, it would be very cool to have a distro installed on the micro-sd card that your computer could boot off of through the n900.

Plus, doesn't the n900 charge through the mini-usb connection?

yes, that should work in most cases.

and yes, the n900 charges through usb

but it could vary a bit from system to system. I believe that there are multiple ways to boot from usb, and bootable usb sticks and older systems could be problematic in general.
But it works fine on my core 2 duo desktop bought in 2007 and on my atom netbook .

Well if you're an owner of an older computer that doesn't technically support booting off of USB, you may want to check out:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html