Boot from 2gb Card
 

so i am new still and waiting for the 770 to show up but trying to read some info, am i getting this right....the articles on booting from MMC card reference a 1gb card at the time there weren't any 2gb cards so i can do the same steps for the 2gb and get more storage. so i assume i use a 2gb to replace the 64meg that comes with the unit. does that mean i can add an additional 2gb to the additional memory slot or am i just missing it all together, any thoughts or suggestions i gladly welcome.

Thanks all for the time. and look forward to hacking the 770.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I did this the other night. If you are following the EASIER guides, you can follow the procedure almost exactly. When you set the partition sizes, simply adjust it as you'd like. Keep in mind that the MMC2 partition is where you will be installing apps. Essentially you are taking directories in flash memory and pointing them to directories on the MMC2 "device". You can then still have an MMC1 partition that is accessible from other operating systems.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I"m a bit confused by how to enter one command:

# sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0p1:1,15000,6
/dev/mmcblk0p2:15001,,
/dev/mmcblk0p3:
/dev/mmcblk0p4:

Should there be returns after each line? Spaces? Or should it all be run together?

Thx

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

just finished doing this right now.. works fine..

one thing
# sfdisk /dev/mmcblk0 <-- this is one command

then it says loads of crap
then you'll be at a prompt like:
/dev/mmcblk0p1:

then you put in 1,15000,6
another thing.. this is where you set how big you want each partition
SO if you have a 2gb card, you're giving 1.5gb to the OS.
Which is TOTALLY unnecessary.
the 15000 is the size of the partition for the 'Memory Card'
whatever size you make this is how big the device will say your memory card is.
the rest will go to the OS, for installing programs and the OS itself.
for my 2gb card i used 1,45000,6 and got over 300mb for proggys and 1.37gb for the memory card.
just make sure you change the second set to whatever you put in the first PLUS ONE.
so if you did:
/dev/mmcblk0p1:1,45000,6
THEN
/dev/mmcblk0p2:45001,,
THEN leave mmcblk0p3 and 4 blank.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Thanks VERY much, Trencher!!

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Based on what I"m reading - I'm wondering if the 1 Gig card I bought (for 15 bucks mind you - so no big deal) was a waste.. It sounds like the 2 gig card is really what's needed if you want to do anything with the unit (such as put 2007HE on it). Is that a correct statement, or can you get away with it on the 1 Gig?

On top of that - I've now noticed that there are MMC Plus cards (reading other posts and looking outside of NewEgg). Are these cards usable in the device? Are they worth it? (seems like they might be from reading around)

Tnx - (newbie who bought from Woot! )

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

MMC Mobile cards are much faster than regular RS-MMC cards. See here: http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#mmcplus
NOTE: I previously said MMC Plus. Those won't fit in the 770. I meant to say MMC Mobile. http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Cata...ile_Cards.aspx

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

well, depending on what you want to do, 1gb should be fine. if you give the os 500mb, that's still 500mb for media, way bigger than 64mb. and you'll still have almost limitless space for installing apps, which will take no space on the media partition. i find that reencoding videos makes them run much faster, and it comes out to about 50mb for 20 mins. easily fit a couple of movies in 500mb.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

So If I were to choose between these two, which one would be best?

mmc, or mmcplus

There's also a 4 gig mmcplus, will that one work with the n770?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Won't both of those stick out from the 770? I can't imagine wanting to have 1/2 a flash card hanging out of my 770, not to mention you couldn't put the hard case back on to put it to sleep.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I just noticed the 32 vs 18 mm. Thanks for pointing that out.

So would this card work? Seems like a better deal than newegg, and it meets the specs.

http://cgi.ebay.com/2GB-OEM-100X-MMC...QQcmdZViewItem

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Yes that card will work just fine, although I can't in all honesty recommend buying flash memory from eBay - there are far too many fakes on offer. :(

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

ikonosin is right: mmc and mmc plus won't fit. DON'T get them for the 770.
Your choice should be between RS-mmc and MMC-Mobile. Get the MMC-Mobile.
For example: http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Cata...ile_Cards.aspx

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

hehe, true, but what the heck, i'll take my chances. ;)

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

How truthful are those transfer rates they list with various cards? The Kingston(from EBay) is like 3x faster than the Sandisk and will there be a noticeable difference?

As for buying from EBay, someone with a 154210 feedbacks with 98.3% positive is extremely likely someone you can purchase from without worry.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

newegg, zipzoomfly, amazon, and buy.com are my vendors of choice. I've bought and sold enough on ebay to get 100 feedbacks and I don't like ebay that much. It's good for hard to find stuff, but it's often very slow shipping, very expensive shipping, etc.. that really irks me.
Plus you have to wait 5 days for the auction to end, only to get outbid 10¢ in the last 5 seconds by some douche without a job who can sit in front of the computer all day.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Also all OEM products warranty is through the SELLER and not the MANUFACTURER, so good luck trying to get the warranty honored. I'll spend the $38 on kingston rather than $35 on an OEM then another $38 on kingston when the OEM dies and the warranty is not honored. It may say lifetime OEM warranty, but it's the sellers lifetime, if they stop selling on ebay and close their account in 6 months you're SOL.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

@weezedog

That's a fairly flawed assessment of ebay.

Before i buy from certain sellers, I always go for the "buy it now" option, and compare the price and shipping, and shipping location, also user ratings obviously.

Those sites you listed above have regular prices, and charge tax, which is why i go for ebay sometimes, especially for insignificant things like memory modules.

So if you get screwed on ebay, it's probably due to your own lack of research on the seller.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I ordered one of these OEM cards from fastmemoryman on eBay just last week.

It shipped fast, but the the card I received was NOT a Kingston labeled card, and it seems to top out at 2MB/sec when tested on the card reader in my Dell E1405. (Shouldn't it be 8MB/sec?)

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

damn, that sure is unfortunate. What brand is the card though? And regarding speed, are you sure it's not a drivers/software problem? since it's getting read from a laptop and all...

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Unfortunate - but surprising? Not really... it's eBay! ;)

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I guess so. :(

@elfworks
I just want to make sure though, have you tested it inside the 770 yet? and if so, is the speed significantly slower? Cuz it just might behave differently in the 770 than when in the laptop. *crosses fingers*

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

So a quick question - to do the steps listed in the HowTo for booting off of the MMC, I'd like to use 2007HE, but all the steps either refer to the 770 or 800, but not 2007HE... Would it be advisable to first flash back to 2006, follow the steps, and before the actual copy flash back up to 2007? TIA (Woot Newbie :) )

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

cue79 - if you're running OS 2007HE, follow the N800 instructions.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

that's what I thought. Any reason the unmount command wouldn't work as root? I keep getting command not found. tia

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Taking a wild guess, you've probably fallen into the classic Linux newbie trap - there's only one "n" in the unmount command, it's spelled umount and not unmount. :D

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

DOH! Will try tonite.. Thanks!

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I used the same software (ATTO ?) to test the MMC card that came with the N770, and the new one. The stock 64MB card was easily twice the speed. ( 2MB/Sec vs 4MB/sec.)

I also tested an A-Data 50X 2GB SD card with the same software, and got throughput up to 4MB/sec, so it's probably not the card reader/laptop.


As for the card that was shipped, ikt was a totally unbranded card - no label at all on the top, and just an indiscriminate part number on the bottom. ( 7169M102CS191MA TW - Turns up nada on Google.)

In the Device Manager, it shows up as Ricoh MMC Disk Device, Rev 1.00.

I'd attach screengrabs, but I don't have an image host yet.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

For future reference, MMC Mobile (sometimes also called MMC Plus) is the best type of card to get for your 770s if you care about performance. MMC Mobile has 4 data pins compared to the single data pin in regular RS-MMC cards.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

It also appears (on Expansys at least) to be twice the price of RS-MMC. :(

Too bad, I was thinking about upgrading my 770 one last time (which, ironically, is exactly what I said everytime before).

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Yes, thats how you recognize it, card has two rows of pins (13 in total, and in fact 8 data pins, not 4). Plain (RS-)MMC has 7 pins in total.

But those extra data pins are not used at all in N770 (at least in the one I have). What matters in N770 is maximum frequency card can do which is 20Mhz for rs-mmc but 26 or 52MHz for mmcmobile. Due to omap chip limitation this translates to 16 vs 24 vs 48 MHz used. You only see the speedup with hacked kernel, though.

The kingston 2gb mmcmobile was a good choice for me. It can run at 48Mhz just fine in my device. Some people reported mmcmobile cards that support only 26Mhz mode, not 52. When I bought it even the price was OK (i.e cheapest from all rsmmc/mmcmobile). Currently it is for approx. 30EUR here including VAT, not sure how cheap other 2gb rs-mmc/mmcmobile cards are.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

How can I check the actual frequency in 770?

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Can you get MMC Plus is the correct form factor? All the MMC Plus I've seen is NOT the reduced size of RS-MMC & MMC Mobile.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Ah sorry, my bad - I thought the MMC updates in more recent firmware supported the wider data buses available in MMCmobile.

I guess MMCmobile is only worthwhile if the price differencial with regular RS-MMC is quite narrow.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

According to the MMC wiki, MMCplus is a synonym for MMCmobile although it's possible (likely?) that MMCmobile is being used for the reduced size form factor and MMCplus for the full-size equivalent.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Yes for N800, no for N770 since the connector in N770 don't have 9 pins but only six. Well, at least in my device.

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Having troubles at the boot menu. Im presented with
1. Internal flash
2. MMC card
3. MMC card, partition 2, ext2
4. USB hard drive
5. Power off (when not on charger)

Which option do i want to choose?
I choose #2 MMC card, but i noticed no size increase when i went 'Memory' in the control panel. I can see the the space on the Card is now 1.37GB. I should have about 500MB, but it still only reads 60MB.
Any suggestions/tips?

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

choose "MMC card, partition 2, ext2", option #2 (the "MMC") will try to boot your device from partition 1, which is the 1.37GB part with no OS installed, so it will automatically boot from flash instead

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

I just finished doing this, and I had some confusion at the boot menu also. The boot menu options seem to be incorrectly displayed, because if I choose #3 I get the "Can't boot from MMC...booting from Flash" error, whereas #2 does boot my OS2007HE N770. I followed the instructions here and in the easy guide, and other than the slightly confusing menu it seems to have worked fine.

@bigred66: I don't think you should see any more memory in the Control Panel. As I understand it, the 770 has two chunks of flash memory: 64 MB for RAM-like use, and 64 MB for hard drive-like internal storage. What you've done is to increase the internal storage chunk (and also put it on a faster chip). So reading system and other files from that chunk should be a lot faster, and you aren't limited to installing only 64 MB total of applications and whatnot.

I am understanding this correctly, right folks?

Re: Boot from 2gb Card
 

Hmm... Perhaps everything didn't work as expected... If I boot from Flash I see all of the new programs that I just installed while booted from MMC (option #2), and when I insert my memory card in my Ubuntu PC it can't read the ext partition (just the big FAT one).

...and it doesn't seem any faster to me...

So perhaps something got messed up in copying the system to the MMC partition?