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benny1967's Avatar
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#1
OK, I deserved running into trouble trying this strange approach to multi-boot without knowing much of the basics. Still, having gotten that far, could anyone who knows what goes on behind the scenes pls. explain what I missed?

What I did was:
  • Set up the boot menu on the 770 (works)
  • Take a 2GB card, put it in my desktop PCs card reader to partition and format it.
  • Use first ext2-partition for Debian (this works! I can boot into it)
  • Use 2nd ext2-partition for OS2007HE (never boots, returns to boot menu)
  • Use 3rd partition as FAT-data-partition (doesnt show up in file manager, doesnt mount automatically)

The fact that debian boots OK should mean that at least I got the basics of "How to dual boot" right, shouldn't it?

Now for the problems:

FAT-Partition (#3):
On a 2GB card, what could be the reason for a FAT-Partition not showing up in the file manager? I tried making it bootable, I tried type 6 (FAT16) or type C (WIN95 OSR2 FAT32), it simply says there's no memory card.
dmesg comes up with
Code:
[ 1758.189788] mmcblk0: mmc0:0001 MMCM   1983488KiB 
[ 1758.190185]  mmcblk0: p1 p2 p3
[ 1758.763854] FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
[ 1758.763946] VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev mmcblk0p1.
which is funny because it should in fact be mmcblk0p3 (I also changed fstab to reflect that).
Does a data partition have to be #1 for the file manager to accept it? I think I can remember partition schemes where this was not the case... ?

OS2007HE (#2):
I tried to be extra-smart here. All the documents I found describe how to copy the running OS from internal flash to MMC. I run OS2006 and I didnt want to flash the HE, copy it, then re-flash OS2006 again.
What I did was: I extracted rootfs.jffs2 out of the 2007HE's fiasco image, mounted it on my PC and copied the files over to MMC. This seems to be OK; when I mount the partition and list the files, what I get seems to be a ITOS-style layout, including the correct owners, rights and stuff. Still, when I select this one from the boot menu, it won't boot.

Facts:
My original partinioning scheme was (device names taken from my desktop PC):
Code:
/dev/sdc1               1        1025     1578472+  83  Linux 
/dev/sdc2            1026        1188      251020   83  Linux 
/dev/sdc3  *         1189        1287      152460    6  FAT16
As I said, I changed the values in /dev/sdc3 quite a bit, changed the bootable flag, changed the FAT variant - had no effect at all.

I then went to do
Code:
mkdosfs /dev/sdc3
mke2fs /dev/sdc1
mke2fs /dev/sdc2
later changing mkdosfs to mkdosfs -F 32 because I read it somewhere - nada.

The relevant parts of my bootmenu.conf are
Code:
MENU_2_NAME="Debian: MMC card, partition 1"
MENU_2_ID="mmc1"
MENU_2_DEVICE="mmcblk0p1"
MENU_2_MODULES="ext2" 
MENU_2_FSTYPE="ext2"
MENU_2_FSOPTIONS="noatime"

MENU_3_NAME="OS2007HE: MMC card, partition 2"
MENU_3_ID="mmc2"
MENU_3_DEVICE="mmcblk0p2"
MENU_3_MODULES="ext2"
MENU_3_FSTYPE="ext2"
MENU_3_FSOPTIONS="noatime"
so 2 and 3 are really pretty much the same, still 3 doesn't work at all.

From reading the forums (and I guess I must have read each and every related thread here) I get the impression the few who know are sick and tired of multi.boot related questions. Still... maybe... Where alse should I ask?