1. Are you running the script as root? Otherwise, you may not have access to the usb port.
2. I had the experience that the executable would only run from the physical root filesystem, and not a mounted usb, where I originally had saved the file (I am using a EeePC 701). I think that because the physical filesystem is not loaded as root, but I'm not sure.

Hope that helps. K.

I wasn't even running the script, I was doing each command, one by one. But when I sudo'd them it was good. I'm not sure what happened when I tried to do it from the usb drive, I finally installed Linux to hard drive anyway.

However, I have figured out some of my issues. I will continue to post my "experiences" as I fumble along so stay tuned for more hilarity as the newbie trips over himself continually!

- I was doing too many things at once and thought I had the same error for all of them. In fact, I was stuck with command not found...

*** Microsoft refugees take note ****
"/.flasher" NOT = "flasher"
The current directory is NOT in the command path, unlike MS products. This is for security apparently, so you don't get caught by a FAKE command or script (like ls) in a directory that you happen to be in. Smart design. Aggravatingly different, but smart.

Right now I'm trying to figure out why I can't mount the file copy I can copy it to the card. Sigh.

Well, not sure what the differences in the commands are, but I finally got the new jffs2 mounted.

Used PartEd to set Disklabel to clear my 8GB card: created a 256MB FAT32, a 4GB ext2, 3 GB ext2 and 1.2GB swap.

But I can't write anything to them! What now? I thought I saw a post somewhere about fixing a non-writable USB drive but can't seem to find it now. I guess this is more of a general Linux newbie issue.

Well, I finally got through all the items on the list and.... it still doesn't work.

The flasher confirms it the root device is MMC i.e. start from the SD card, looking at the SD card on my PC shows all the files from the jffs2 extract are there, but I still get a white screen after it finishes booting.

YEHAW!!! I can boot from SD!

It was the fact that it's an 8GB card - I needed to use the Panasonic Low Level Format program.
Formatted it, used gparted (because I couldn't figure out how to point at the card from shell on my PC) to resize the FAT32 to 500MB and the rest to ext2 (well, 2 ext2 - 4GB & 3GB), recopied (tar) the jjfs2 to the ext2 partition on the card and boom! Up she came!

The last issue... despite the control panel memory showing as 3.5GB available, I have no available memory to do save anything?! Sigh.

Doing a search of the message base now.

I partially figured out what's going on... the entire file system is read-only?!

How do I fix that? I assume that tar copied the file permissions from the read-only jjfs2 mount from the PC onto the "internal" SD card (mmc2).

The control-panel/memory says there's no virtual space and nothing in the GUI will find the "external" SD card (mmc1). Xterm will find /media/mmc1 but that's the only thing.

Of course, I can't install anything either.

unlikely, I think I did it like this and had no such problem, mount should not modify permissions when seting fs to read only via -o ro. Why do you think it is read only? Can you copy here output of "ls -la / /home /home/user"?

I have the 8gb card partioned into 500mb fat32, 4gb ext2, 3.5 gb ext2.
There's also the 2gb card in the external slot.
Also where is/should the internal flash memory mount when booting from the card?
A friend saw that there are two root mounts and wondered why?!

~ $ ls -la /
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 .dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 3600 Sep 6 21:14 dev
drwxr-xr-x 63 root root 4096 Sep 6 21:14 etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 floppy
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:06 home
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 initrd
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 lib
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Sep 6 21:16 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:06 media
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 99 root root 0 Jan 1 1970 proc
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 6 17:38 root
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 22 07:33 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:03 srv
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 0 Jan 1 1970 sys
drwxrwxrwt 9 root root 680 Sep 8 01:32 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:05 usr
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 var

~ $ ls -la /home
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:06 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 ..
drwxr-x--- 8 user users 4096 Sep 6 17:38 user

~ $ ls -la /home/user
drwxr-x--- 8 user users 4096 Sep 6 17:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 12 17:06 ..
-rw------- 1 user users 16 Sep 6 21:38 .esd_auth
drwx------ 2 user users 4096 Sep 6 17:38 .gnome2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Sep 6 21:20 .icons -> /usr/share/user-icons
drwxr-xr-x 2 user users 4096 Jun 5 12:40 .mediaplayer-engine
drwxr-xr-x 3 user users 4096 Sep 6 21:38 .osso
drwxr-xr-x 2 user users 4096 Jun 12 17:06 .osso-cud-scripts
drwxr-xr-x 3 user users 4096 Jun 12 17:05 .osso_rss_feed_reader
drwxr-xr-x 7 user users 4096 Jun 12 17:05 MyDocs
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 Jun 12 17:03 first-boot-flag

here's what I get from mount::

~ $ mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on /mnt/initfs type jffs2 (ro)
none on /mnt/initfs/proc type proc (rw)
none on /mnt/initfs/sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /mnt/initfs/tmp type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 on / type ext2 (ro)
none on /tmp type tmpfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)

~ $ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2 2048 2048 0 100% /mnt/initfsnone 512 128 384 25% /mnt/initfs/tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p2 4159876 249584 3700644 6% /
none 512 128 384 25% /tmp
none 1024 68 956 7% /dev
tmpfs 1024 0 1024 0% /dev/shm
~ $

not mounted and not used at all, you can mount it by hand if you need it
That's 'normal', first root is in initfs partition, then real root is mounted and swapped with previous one via pivot_root.

file permissions look good but this
is pretty strange. Nokia initfs mounts root rw by default not ro as you have there, do you have some linuxrc customizations there (like Debian booting)?

I was going to wait to sort everything out before posting the entire list, but here's my steps (so far) cribbed from your notes to me and to benny and a few others.

1. installed Ubuntu 8, downloaded flasher-3, diablo ARM binary, download & install Panasonic LLF program (full format, no erase).

1.5 sudo su
>>> all the following commands need to be executed as root, so either go superuser, or prepend sudo to the commands.

2. ./flasher-3.0 --set-root-device mmc
>>> (well, I ran it and found the stuff to do this, not done it yet, just in case, you know?)

3. ./flasher-3.0 -u -F diablo_ARM.bin
>>> finally realized ./ needed & renamed binary to make it easier to type

4. sudo su
>>> kept forgetting which commands needed sudo, just went to su.

5. losetup -f
>>> gave me /dev/loop1 << apparently 1 being the next available "loop" (virtual disk) on my default Ubuntu at least
>>> note the /dev/loop# and use it in the next command

6. losetup /dev/loop1 rootfs.jffs2

7. modprobe block2mtd block2mtd=/dev/loop1,131072
>>> BUT trying to mount immediately didn't work, I had to pull the extra commands from the script:

8. modprobe jffs2

9. modprobe mtdblock

10. mount -t jffs2 -o ro /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt/jffs2/

11. tar -cf - -C /mnt/jffs2 . | tar -xvf - -C /media/disk
>>> had to add the "-" on the second tar