In Fanoush's description of how to install the hacked OS for higher MMC transfer speed (http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#mmcplus) he says

"I suggest you first boot it via 'flasher-2.0 -l -b -k zImage-su-18-200625-2gb-mmcplus52Mhz' and test all your cards before flashing permanently.
If it works you can flash it via 'flasher-2.0 -k zImage-su-18-200625-2gb-mmcplus52Mhz -f -R'.
If you are sure you want to flash it without testing and prefer flashing directly from the device without using USB cable, you may try my kernel flasher above."

I'm confused by this. I have copied the stock 2006 OS to my 1GB MMC card and now have several boot options on cold start:

Internal flash
MMC card
MMC card, partition 2, ext2
USB hard drive

The 1st and 3rd I understand, "MMC card" don't know what that's for, does the 4th mean I can boot via USB from my PC's HD? I tried googling for more info and get hints that yes, it's possible; there's a page of incorrect info out there somewhere.

If there's a page of correct info somewhere I'd love to see it. The notion of trying a hacked OS before flashing it sounds great to me.

This info is pretty well spread out.

Fanoush's MMC mods work with basically every MMC card out there, with the exception of the one included with the 770s, ironically enough. The danger is extremely small, and reflashing is an easy and largely riskless process. The kernel is not the OS: this is more analogous to updating your device drivers.

MMC card and USB hard drive are, as far as I'm aware, not intended for general use. No, you cannot boot via USB from your PC's HD directly. Yes, you can attach an USB hard drive to the 770 and boot off of it.

How can I format the partition into ext2, I dont have the mke2fs or mkfs.ext2 in the xterm as the wiki / maemo said.

Anyone has more info on this, boot off from USB HD?

TIA,

bun

in root mode,

apt-get install e2fsprogs

I tried to do it but it seems not worth the effort !
We have to make the N8x0 recognize the USB HD at the boot time and as well to have all modules to recognize ext2, etx3, .. partitions.

We need to modify fanoush's init-flasher !

Why don't you do it, bun ?

fanoush's initfs-flasher bootmenu already has an option for usb boot. So all you need is to have a clone on the USB flash drive. I think I can try to 'ghost' a 4G SD onto a 4G USB flash drive and see......would that make my computer full of ghost ?
?
?

bun

That's built-in feature of original Nokia startup scripts for 770 only. Later they removed it for N8x0. Still it might work if you set bootmenu to enable host mode and set root device correctly (/dev/sda1 ?) Well, unless there is some timing problem, usb storage devices are detected slowly.

You only need a 2GB drive.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com

On the left side is links to Install to External USB Hard Disk....

I am not sure if this applies to the NIT, but the directions may help for what you are trying to do.

I tried that yesterday (YOU and I click :-) , right?) and it did NOT work. I stucked at unionfs.ko not found and the system kick me out. I emailed to amin@pendrivelinux.com already and should be talking to them soon. This unionfs.ko has been discussed and the solution is ?

What I have in trouble is the file structure of USB HD, like /dev/sda or /dev/sda1 or /media/usb/sda1. If someone can point to me about the where to go with ext2 ext3 etc, I would like to try on my 4G flash drive. The cloning process should not be that different, uh?

cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

31 0 128 mtdblock0
31 1 384 mtdblock1
31 2 2048 mtdblock2
31 3 4096 mtdblock3
31 4 255488 mtdblock4
254 0 8067072 mmcblk0
254 1 6000639 mmcblk0p1
254 2 1869824 mmcblk0p2
254 3 196608 mmcblk0p3
254 8 8067072 mmcblk1
254 9 6143999 mmcblk1p1
254 10 1923072 mmcblk1p2
8 0 156290904 sda
8 1 156288321 sda1


bun