Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

Kudos to all the contributors, esp Milhouse and Schmot!!!
Not being a Linux-savvy-dude I was however able to follow the procedures and clone OS2007 to SD.
2 questions though:

1) it looks like rootfs takes an extra 100M or so...is it because initial fs is compressed (jfss2) and the cloned one isn't (ext2)?

2) VERY IMPORTANT FOR ME: can I flash the OS on SD to upgrade to OS2008? This would be AWESOME...to preserve OS2007 on flash and toy with OS2008 at the same time.
My biggest beef with OS2007 is crappy Skype performance (100% crashes after 10 min or so...no matter what I tried).

Thanks a bunch....

PS. In case anyone wonders if the Dell regular Bluetooth keyboard works (normal size, can't find the model # now)..it does - pretty good.

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

1) Correct - your internal flash memory is 256MB, but to clone the OS it's recommended that you make available at least 512MB because of the internal compression

2) Not easily, and I admit this would be very handy (ie. to "flash" a FIASCO image direct to MMC/SD) - doing this has been discussed a few times on the forum, if I knew the commands to do this I'd write a script! :)

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

Thanks Milhouse! One last (!) question: can I copy the content of SD into flash (reverse cloning)?
I want to use my N800 booted from SD at all times (just as a safety measure), but inevitably the 2 versions will be out-of-sync (due to updates and new sw installed).

Cheers

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

I guess it should be possible; The root filesystem for internal flash can be accessed by mounting /dev/mtdblock4 then erasing it (I'm not sure if it's possible to format the jffs2 partition) and tranferring your OS from MMC/SD...

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

I have followed instructions and cloned the OS 2007 to the internal SD card. There is one issue though. The vfat partition is only automounted after reboot. If I try to connect N800 to a pc via usb, it shows an error about internal memory card being in use. External card mounts fine. After disconnection, only external card is remounted on n800. I have to remount the vfat first partition manually for the device to. Funnily enough if I connect the usb cable and power on the device (after switching it off obviously) then all partitions appear on my desktop ready to be mounted. Is there any way of making it work properly so I can have the first partition being unmounted when connected to pc and mounted back when disconnected from pc. Thanks a lot for any suggestions.

Simon

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

Yes, for small differences use rsync. For bigger ones it is best to recreate whole jffs2 image from current SD and flash it to internal flash while booted from mmc. The naive way -
mount /dev/mtdblock4 /opt
rm -rf /opt/*
tar clone from mmc2 to mtdblock4
would work too but will be far from optimal, mount and access time will be poor, jffs2 is journaled and there is nothing but journal so with this way the filesystem will consist of huge number of tiny records/logs of separate changes for removing/creating each file. Making new jffs2 image gives best performance. Search this forum for mkfs.jffs2 and flash_eraseall.

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

No. You can't easily extract firmware image directly to SD card from the tablet. It is possible but quite complicated so I won't go to details. It is easier to do it on linux desktop PC but still it is complicated. You can unpack firmware to pieces and mount rootfs.jffs2 on PC and archive it via tar or copy to card. AFAIK there is no way to extract jffs2 image directly (i.e. no mtd modules in kernel and no mount). The easiest way is to flash new firmware to internal flash, then copy it to mmc and then possibly restore previous backup of internal flash.

Also you can boot both 2007 and 2008 rootfs from card/internal flash but you will not have full functionality. There is only one shared kernel and initfs partition and 2007 vs 2008 differ too much. You can boot 2007 with 2008's kernel and initfs but wifi won't work in 2007.

I am currently playing with kexec idea (i.e. booting more kernels) but it is far from usable state. And this route will be more complicated since you would need to have more initfs partitions too. Perhaps it is too complicated for average person to be practical.

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

Thanks Fanoush! It has sorted the problem straight away. Now I can enjoy my N800 to a full extent!!.

Re: Cloning OS to SD Card: Simplified instructions
 

In xterminal I

cd /home
find

which brings up allot of directories so i find where the file is extracted to which says

./user/MyDocs/documents/initfs_flasher

so i copy that line

exec ./user/MyDocs/documents/initfs_flasher

It seems like it running but it runs for a long period and my processor manager says that osso-xterm 48% and Xomap is 41%

What am i doing wrong?

After step 5 I can't see the internal card i formatted in the memory section. I'm sure It's just a line of code im not familiar with to run. I dont know shell or terminal command codes.


n800
OS2008
8 Gig MMC