Hmm.., you got the point. After 2 days of SD card bugging/debugging I have no power to play around with SDHC Kernel support. Just want them to work, so I can play around with much more usable N800 stuff

The SDHC kernel is very easy to apply (if you have Linux) and doesn't wipe any application data so you can revert back to the stock kernel if you wish all within a few minutes. I've been using the kernel from here and this kernel may have several bug fixes for non-SDHC (ie. MMC and SD) cards as well. Worth a shot, you have nothing to lose.

I got the A-DATA 8GB SDHC work w/patched kernel no problem. Like fanoush said, you probably have a incompat card. But also, I got a question. When you format and reformat(mkfs.ext2) the card, install and reinstall over and over, have you ever make the partition from scratch, or try format it from the PC instead? As, corrupt partition table could get you the same problem, regardless of how many time you reformat the card.

Yes I did that a few times. I bought a card-reader on saturday. I made new a new partition table, too. I even did a complete dd if=/dev/zero wipeout and then again made an new table, partitions and filesystems.

Then, it's definitely time for a new card. At this point, SDHC is cheap, and it look like you know what you are doing, more space=more power to you, 8GB SDHC price isn't that much more than the 4GB SD card.

Will bootmenu still work with the proposed new feature from Nokia, lockdown?

Presumably it wouldn't as it is just a metapackage? And if no problems, you could have the lockdown mode in flash, then use bootmenu with red pill mode to experiment?

Rich

Yes, it is not related. The initfs flasher is not an installable package. Also all installed packages live in the rootfs but bootmenu itself is installed elsewhere so package management does not apply to it.

I am thinking about installable package but the bootmenu initfs modification does have serious impact on the way system boots so I think it is better that the procedure is a bit more complicated. That way people are aware that they must be a bit careful and have time to think if the really want to do this or not. Currently by the time you have the menu installed there is high chance you actually learned what it does and what are the implications :-)

Hey DCr33P,

I read and re-read this thread and tried to get as much as I could but I am still stuck on the advantages. If I were able to boot from the MMC, would this still be the same as booting normally and then using the apps loaded or does this boot me into a special mode? I would assume that the Bootloader would reside on the MMC and facilitate this booting. Is this correct? I heard somewhere, here I think that Nokia will release an upgrade to the current OS version in a few weeks. If so, I may try the "boot from MMC" option and this way, if I brick my N800, I have no worries, as I can just upgrade the system. Does this make sense? By the way, I am using a Mac so I am not sure if some of these tools are compatible, or do I need a Windows/Linux box to try this?

Ok, I will try to answer as much as I can:

It's like having two different operating systes. The one OS (the original) is stored on the internal 256 flash memory of the device. The other one is the cloned system from your flash, stored on mmc/sd. From the moment on, you clone your original system from flash to the mmc/sd card, you will have two identical and seperated systems. Then you can choose from the menu of the bootloader which one you want to start. Changes on the first operating system do not affect anything on the other one. The other way around, too.
Installing an application on the OS on the card leaves the internal OS untouched. One can interprete that "special mode" is the abillity to install as many applications as you want(...and can fit on mmc/sd card), to have faster system and to have superior backup/restore possibilities.
Backup would be very easy:
- Put your card in a card reader and copy the whole ext2 partition to you desktop machine. When something went wrong, just copy it back.
OR:
- mount your rootfs on your card to a second mountpoint and copy the whole mountpoint via tar/rsync through a ssh connection(or smb share/ NFS) remotely to everywhere you want.


The bootloader is not on the mmc card, it's stored on internal flash.
Is it stored on /dev/mtdblock0 ???

You can't brick your system with this dualbooting story. IMHO, the worst thing that can happen is that the flashing process of the bootloader goes wrong. But then, you can always reflash with the standard bootloader, theoratically. You will not loose any data. If everything works and you boot from SD-OS, then even flashing is not nessecarily, since you can easilly recover the whole system if you broke your OS. The chances that you ever definitlely brick your device are very very very very very low, unless you mess up with one of the early "bootloaders" of the system. But I think nobody did this...
If you brick your OS on the flash, then you can simply reflash. If you brick your kernel, you can simply reflash just the kernel...
Have to admit that I have never done this, cause I have not bricked my device, so far. But I got it only for 2 Weeks... the time will come... but that should be no big deal

I am using linux all the time, so I don't know how those WIN/MAC tools behave. A Linux Live-CD can solve all you problems, if you don't like to install Linux AND DUALBOOT

I hope I could answer a few points, since I live in Germany and there are only basic school-english-skills left, I hope it's understandable

Juheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Finally, it worked!
So I definitely know, COS EXTREMEMORY ain't good for the n800!
There are still some "problems":
While copying with gnu-tar I got somekind of an error at the end.
Tar "said" there were files from date 01.01.1970. I don't know if tar just stopped copying then, or if this was just a warning. Booting works, but perhaps some files are not copied, after all? ... I got not input/output or dmesg errors, that's the important part.
Second subject... I can't connect via usb and got the message "[..] unable to connect via usb[..] Memory cards in use: internal memory card". Somehow it's logical, cause my ext2 partition is used as rootfs by the system and can't be unmountend due to the usb connection process. But what's with my first fat32 partition on the card? It doesn't show up on my PC Only the 128mb nokia card in external slot can be accessed from PC.
Any ideas, how to solve this?