Dual Booting Discussion

[darmeen]

Was just over at XDA reading through the flashable dual boot ROM thread

[ROM] Flashable eMMC dual boot ROMs (Froyo, Honeycomb, Eclair, CM7) - xda-developers

and man, does my head hurt!

I am certainly willing to give it a try, but of course I want to tweak it for my desires.

Has anyone else looked at the dual boot option?

What I want to do is have a clean rooted eclair, move it to the second position, then install the phiremod beta v2 back as my primary.

Thoughts?

 

[faceman]

I want to do this as well, just haven't had the time to experiment. I followed the thread daily for awhile and have just been pulled away by other more pressing tweaks... mainly dealing with CWR, cause I know enough that I am not going to experiment unless I KNOW my backup/recovery options won't break.

I'm willing to watch you play though and then tell me how to do it later.

 

[rico2001]

Dual booting... not my cup of tea but cool nevertheless. I think we'll all be on HC full time sometime in the next few months.

 

[darmeen]

Well here was my thought...I can have a clean rooted B&N OS as my secondary boot...which would allow me to get screenshots from it any time I like for tutorial purposes, but then I have my primary boot which is my daily driver.

and I figured at least one of us should know something about it around here.

 

[faceman]

I like the db idea for a few reasons: ability to go into stock os for B&N magazines, ability to have a daily that I DONT play with while still having a tinkering os that I DO play with.

 

[darmeen]

This may not work the way I want it to...

This is what worries me

Only thing to note is if the other ROMs you flash overwrites u-boot.bin, you will lose the dual boot capability.

Because I am trying to move my eclair ROM to the secondary boot position, If the ROM I choose to write into the primary position overwrites the u-boot.bin file, everything I have done so far today will be a total waste of time. (other than learning what NOT to do that is)

 

[darmeen]

Well, I succeeded in installing a dual boot setup. On my primary boot, I am running phiremod v2 BETA, and on my secondary boot, I am running B&N v1.1 Autonooter 3.0

I haven't done any OC'ing or much app installing...but I have successfully booted into both OS's multiple times.

I am going to let this Tablet of Pure Awesomeness (sounds like something from my D&D days! lol) rest for the night, and I have been up for nearly 20 hours myself, so I think I need a recharge myself.

More tomorrow (or later today rather)!

 

[faceman]

what!?!?!? how dare you have success and then not give a 3 page dissertation on how you did it? I am outraged!








ok, not really. get some sleep and we'll just wait nicely. for a while. ;-)

 

[vinal]

Well, I succeeded in installing a dual boot setup. On my primary boot, I am running phiremod v2 BETA, and on my secondary boot, I am running B&N v1.1 Autonooter 3.0

I haven't done any OC'ing or much app installing...but I have successfully booted into both OS's multiple times.

I am going to let this Tablet of Pure Awesomeness (sounds like something from my D&D days! lol) rest for the night, and I have been up for nearly 20 hours myself, so I think I need a recharge myself.

More tomorrow (or later today rather)!

Wish I had the same luck running dual boot prep. As I noted in another thread, the 'resize' fails and I (and others) haven't sorted out why yet.

If the next person to run the dual boot prep wouldn't mind, would you please fire up adb shell while in clockworkmod and run a couple partition checks. None of the commands below will modify anything. Run the commands before running the 'dual boot prep' zip.

Trying to find out what is so 'special' about my NC

You can send me a PM with results or post here if you'd like.

Thanks in advance.

~ # mount
~ # cat etc/fstab
~ # df
~ # fdisk -ul /dev/block/mmcblk0

 

[darmeen]

My first blush impressions and a trip through my evening/night:

I would imagine if you were setting up a dual boot system as it is written up @ XDA, things wouldn't be too bad. You have immediate access to the all the files, you know the dev and community have been testing and tweaking, and all of his files should play nice with each other. Of course I have to do it my way, so instead of having the eclair install as the primary boot, I want it on the secondary. That is all well and good, as the dev even created a script ROM that literally duplicates your primary boot information to your secondary boot partition, designed to make a complete copy of your eclair boot. Well that certainly worked just fine.

and here is where the rails end

All of the flashable ROM's the dev offers (and it is a few: Nookie Froyo, CM7, HC) are meant to flash to the secondary boot, as in, you run them and they flash to the secondary boot (get it? you can't change that part). Well I don't want to install to the secondary boot!

So, now I am in the hunt to find a primary boot ROM...but which one? I have to be very careful because if I choose the wrong one, I instantly hose my dual boot setup.

You see, you need the dual boot u-boot.bin file to be intact between both partitions. If the ROM I choose overwrites that file, dual boot gets wiped out.

So now I spend a couple hours reading through page after page on the various ROM's, and you know what...that little morsel of information is pretty much non-existent.

My first attempt was with Nookie Froyo 0.6.8...it wasn't on my NC 10 minutes. BUT...it didn't touch the u-boot.bin file, so for this I was happy.

I still don't want to get on the CM7 wagon yet, chasing nightlies for one, and second...I am SURE those guys messed with the u-boot file!

I definitely don't want to go HC...after all, I am searching for my daily driver here.

Well...I do still have the phiremod ROM on my mSD...you know what, screw it. I am going to go for it. (my reasoning...well, I want a 2.2+ ROM running, and I am now out of other viable options)

If installing phiremod screws up my dual boot, I will just have to give up on the idea for now...that and its now 11:45pm and I have been up since 5:15am

It installs fine from CWR, but upon bootup I am getting a lot of force closes before I even set it up...okay not a good start. Reboot into recovery.

Wipe /system, wipe /data...install it again. (Did I do that the first time? oh hell, I can't remember)

Reboot...

Tada! Ding ding ding, we have a winner! It goes through setup fine, sees my sdcard, I install a couple apk's, verify market, sync gmail, check youtube, etc.

Get some force closes on Super Manager (a very nice app btw) which was running fine on phiremod previously...hmm, maybe should reboot

Okay, now I am clickin along...no more force closes, just beauty...for now.

Then I came on here, declared my success, then passed out.

This is my experience thus far with a dual boot setup.

 

[darmeen]

Wish I had the same luck running dual boot prep. As I noted in another thread, the 'resize' fails and I (and others) haven't sorted out why yet.

If the next person to run the dual boot prep wouldn't mind, would you please fire up adb shell while in clockworkmod and run a couple partition checks. None of the commands below will modify anything. Run the commands before running the 'dual boot prep' zip.

Trying to find out what is so 'special' about my NC

You can send me a PM with results or post here if you'd like.

Thanks in advance.

~ # mount
~ # cat etc/fstab
~ # df
~ # fdisk -ul /dev/block/mmcblk0

Oh sure...now you mention that!

and cause me to panic and go look...yep, I am screwed! The secondary partition is correct, 3.xx GB, but my primary partition is only 898MB

 

[vinal]

Oh sure...now you mention that!

and cause me to panic and go look...yep, I am screwed! The secondary partition is correct, 3.xx GB, but my primary partition is only 898MB

How did you get those numbers?

 

[darmeen]

Well, on my eclair ROM, I just went into device info and it displays the the internal memory usage

 

[vinal]

OK. My disk info still shows 5G, but i haven't done the prep. The resize seems to partion 3999M for the 2nd OS, so not sure if what you see is correct or not.

Sent from my sdk using Android Tablet Forum App

 

[darmeen]

Yeah, its correct...my eclair OS is on the second slot, so it is showing nearly 4GB of space and primary showing nearly 1GB