Qi - how do I make it boot from another partition on the SD card?

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

Hello,

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Niels Heyvaert
<nielsheyvaert at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> > No hint on how to make Qi boot from other partitions on the SD card?
> >
> Could this be of help to you?
>
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Qi
>
>
Thanks - I know about  and have read that page. And it hasn't been updated
since I read it last time. :-)


> But no guarantee you'll find an answer there.
>

Nope. according to that page, putting a file named noboot-GTA02 in the /boot
directory on a partition makes Qi skip that parttion in the boot process.
This semms to be true - if I put that file on p2 (partition 2) of my SD
card, Qi doesn't boot that partition.
Unfortunately, it doesn't boot p3 (partition 3) either. AFAICT, p3 has the
layout and the files necessary to boot from (it is a copy of a working set
of files from p2).
Why Qi doesn't want to boot it, I don't know.
Is anybody able to select which partition to boot (on a SD card) by using
the noboot-GTA02 file?

>
> I, for one, still haven't found a way to make Qi boot from SD


How is the layout of your SD card, partition-wise?
Mine (a 2GB sd card) is like this:
p1, vfat, 792 MB - I use this for data, it is mounted as /media/card
p2, ext3, 500 MB - this is my main os, root partition
p3, ext3, 500 MB - this is another os, for testing purposes (ths is the one
that Qi don't want to boot)
p4, swap, 128 MB - this is a swap partition, needed in some cases

or in fdisk 'p' output:
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 1967 MB, 1967128576 bytes
57 heads, 56 sectors/track, 1203 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3192 * 512 = 1634304 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk0p1             694        1203      813960    6  FAT16
/dev/mmcblk0p2               1         307      489944   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3             308         614      489972   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p4             615         693      126084   82  Linux swap /
Solaris

The kernel lives in /boot, øike this:
root at neo:/root# ls -l /boot
total 1844
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root      36 Aug  4 14:50 append-GTA02
-rw-r--r-- 1 1000 1000 1877860 Sep  8 23:10 uImage-GTA02.bin

Following hte name standard is necessary for this to work.

With this layout, p1 is skipped and p2 is automatically booted whenever I
turn on my FreeRunner with a short press of the power button. Note: it will
taake 2 minutes or more before anything shows on the screen if you use
QtMoko. Qi doesn't output anything unless told to do so.

Note (from the Qi wiki page) that Qi will not boot from fat partitions, if
that's what your are trying to do.
HTH
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen
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