Related
I've had a lot of success creating a bootable CM7 using the size agnostic preparation instructions. (Here) I want to keep the Nook at stock, for a variety of reasons. Anyway, I created a very nice installation on a 16gb uSD card and did a lot of work setting up LP+ and my hundred-odd android apps. (I also have an Evo 4G). I was fortunate enough to get a 32gb uSD at a great price and want to move my installation over to that. The most successful by making an image with the Win32DriveImage and flashing that back to the 32gb uSD card, which leaves a large area of un-partitioned space. I've tried a couple downloaded tools but have been unsuccessful. Is there a command I can use in Terminal Emulator to to do that? I know I can use the agnostic procedure to start from scratch, but I'd really hate to do that.
The only thing that would make starting over is if someone can point me to instructions that would allow me to have an installation that boots from uSD and has fully functional CWR and Rom Manager. I love how it works on my EVO to download and install updates with a couple clicks. (Everything I've tried there seems to mess with the core Nook).
Thanks a lot!
Rob
Use Minitool Partition Wizard, or another windows partition manager to expand the last storage partition.
LBN1 said:
Use Minitool Partition Wizard, or another windows partition manager to expand the last storage partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried a few partition managers and run into the same problem including with MiniTool. It will start the process of expanding or copying and expanding in one step, but it will eventually say "file system error" just before it finishes. It suggests repairing the file system, but none of the tools can do this with the ext4 partition. Still trying though. Gonna give the Acronis partition manager a whirl.
bitbearmi said:
Is there a command I can use in Terminal Emulator to to do that? I know I can use the agnostic procedure to start from scratch, but I'd really hate to do that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can edit partitions with fdisk from the terminal emulator. I suggest googling, it's a pretty old school tool and isn't very friendly. You should easily be able to resize your "sd" partition with that. Actually more accurately you should be able to delete that last partition and then create a bigger one in it's place. won't keep your data, but you can just copy it over to your computer and resize, then copy back.
Another option would be gparted which comes with basically every live linux cd ever. That one can actually do true resizes and should handle ext4 partitions easily (it is a linux file system after all)
bitbearmi said:
The only thing that would make starting over is if someone can point me to instructions that would allow me to have an installation that boots from uSD and has fully functional CWR and Rom Manager. I love how it works on my EVO to download and install updates with a couple clicks. (Everything I've tried there seems to mess with the core Nook).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You don't need to start over. Get a new uboot.bin for your cards boot partition from here.
Then get the clockwordmod kernel and ramdisk from the zip at the end of this post. Put the uImage and uRamdisk on the sd card as uAltImg and uAltRam.
Now when you choose sd:alternate from the boot menu it will boot you into clockwork.
Thank you so much. I think that will do the trick.
..rob
ylixir said:
You don't need to start over. Get a new uboot.bin for your cards boot partition from here.
Then get the clockwordmod kernel and ramdisk from the zip at the end of this post. Put the uImage and uRamdisk on the sd card as uAltImg and uAltRam.
Now when you choose sd:alternate from the boot menu it will boot you into clockwork.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OK. All is well and the dual-boot solution is super-convenient. But I'm a little perplexed as to how to work with CWM in this environment. Ideally I'd like this to work just as it does on my EVO, Rom Manager lets me know there is a new version, I select it, it downloads asks if an want Gapps and backup (yes please) then it does its thing. Maybe that is way too much to ask. If so, then the main things I need to know are how to instal an updated build that I download separately? Do I just copy it to the root of the boot partition.
Sorry for being such a n00b with the nook. Its funny but I'm much more confident messing with my phone, which if bricked, is pretty catastrophic. (LOL)
The instructions for updating CM7 for the agnostic build is in the OP's post for that build.
"How to update to a new build:
put the new build you want to try on the first partition. (the name must be update-cm-*.zip or cm_encore_full*.zip or just update-*.zip)
Boot from the SDcard in the recovery mode (see above) and the new snapshot would be installed.
The partition layout would be preserved, filesystems are NOT reformatted, so your data should be safe."
Also, Easeus Partition Manager is supposed to be able to resize partitions w/o destroying data. YMMV, of course. I used it to extend ext 4 but prior to putting anything there.
Didn't have any luck with easus either, but ended up using a gparted boot which worked great. Normally I would use recovery nandroid to backup the rom before installing the updated, but when I did that by booting into alternate, I ended up backing up the nook rom to the root partition, so I think the safest thing to do is to use win32diskmanager to image the entire sd card.
ylixir said:
You don't need to start over. Get a new uboot.bin for your cards boot partition from here.
Then get the clockwordmod kernel and ramdisk from the zip at the end of this post. Put the uImage and uRamdisk on the sd card as uAltImg and uAltRam.
Now when you choose sd:alternate from the boot menu it will boot you into clockwork.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So, just to make absolutely sure, if I already have CM7 installed on an SD card, which I've been using as a daily driver, installing apps, downloading Kindle books, PDFs, and the like, but I want to put CWMR onto the SD card, the steps you outlined should be OK?
NOTE: I know, I know, if I'm confused I probably shouldn't be screwing around with things...But the size-agnostic SD CM7 method was so bloodless that I thought the other stuff would be pretty easy to do. For whatever reason, adding stuff like the OC kernel and CWMR has been a little confusing.
Hello,
As the title says, I'm a new CM7 user (running verygreen's SDcard installer, using the 1.3 generic image, with nightly 87, no OC). This is running beautifully, except for one thing... I didn't use a big enough SDcard to start with and now I'm faced with looking for the right way to migrate to a larger card (or alternatively to make use of the NC's built-in eMMC in some fashion to augment the current SDcard).
Can someone tell me if the following approach will work? And is it the right/best way?
1. Use Win32Imager to make a full disk image of the current card (4GB).
2. Write the image to a new 8GB or 16GB card. At this point I should have a perfect copy except that there'll be wasted space on the card past the final partition.
3. Boot into a Linux recovery type LiveCD and use gparted to expand the final partition to use up the rest of the space.
4. Am I done? (crosses fingers?)
The goal of this move is to give myself some room to drop movies, music, etc. onto the /mnt/sdcard partition (which I believe is called /media by NC Stock 1.2?) Will what I described work?
Thanks in advance,
fuul4nook
P.S. One extra question, will the fact that my NC is a blue dot cause any problems with the idea? And if not, is there any way I can use the eMMC partitions while running CM7 from SDcard?
fuul4nook said:
Hello,
As the title says, I'm a new CM7 user (running verygreen's SDcard installer, using the 1.3 generic image, with nightly 87, no OC). This is running beautifully, except for one thing... I didn't use a big enough SDcard to start with and now I'm faced with looking for the right way to migrate to a larger card (or alternatively to make use of the NC's built-in eMMC in some fashion to augment the current SDcard).
Can someone tell me if the following approach will work? And is it the right/best way?
1. Use Win32Imager to make a full disk image of the current card (4GB).
2. Write the image to a new 8GB or 16GB card. At this point I should have a perfect copy except that there'll be wasted space on the card past the final partition.
3. Boot into a Linux recovery type LiveCD and use gparted to expand the final partition to use up the rest of the space.
4. Am I done? (crosses fingers?)
The goal of this move is to give myself some room to drop movies, music, etc. onto the /mnt/sdcard partition (which I believe is called /media by NC Stock 1.2?) Will what I described work?
Thanks in advance,
fuul4nook
P.S. One extra question, will the fact that my NC is a blue dot cause any problems with the idea? And if not, is there any way I can use the eMMC partitions while running CM7 from SDcard?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You should be able to do what you want but use Easeus Partition Manager to extend the 4th partition on the SD to get full use of the card. I don't know what you mean by "blue dot", but you can access 5 gb on the emmc directly through apps if it's music or video. You can also use File Expert or Root Explorer to store what you want on the emmc partition, which will then also be available when you boot into the stock NC rom.
Hi,
First off if this is answered I am sorry.
I did a lot of searching and was unable to see the answer to this...
I am running CM7.1 off uSD. Install went well, and have no issues. That being said, I am unable to find out where on the card to sideload books. I have booted into CM7.1, turned on USB storage, and have 2 drives appear in win: MYNOOK and CM7 SDCARD. I used the size agnostic image, and it appears that there is only the single partition on the card, and in file explorer, it shows the correct card size for memory, but only the single partition.
The only folders appearing on the card are:
.android_secure
Android
LOST.DIR
I tried to manually copy the books, media, etc. folders into a My Files folder on this drive, without success.
There is no other partition to repartition (shouldn't have to do that with size agnostic?). I have no problem loading books into the MYNOOK book folder, which I assume is the internal device memory.
Here is my question. How/where do I sideload books to use the storage on the uSD card? Do I have to create the folders somewhere? If so where?
My goal is to utilize the storage available on the card, but be able to read the titles in the stock software. Is it possible to do this without rooting, or do I need to root for any reason to access the right folders on the card for storage?
THANK YOU ALL!!
klewlessnoob said:
I tried to manually copy the books, media, etc. folders into a My Files folder on this drive, without success.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In what way was it not successful? Did the files copy and just can't find them with a reader? If so which reader?
The book I transferred over was not found in the stock software when I opened my library. Is there somewhere specific I am supposed to place it on the card for the Nook to see it? Thanks!
For the stock reader, I think you must use the 1gb area of the internal memory drive, which shows up as a separate drive on your PC when you plug it into the computer. When you are in CM7 and connect to the pc, cancel when it tries to install a device for the NC. Check the notifications on the NC, you need to click a button to enable copying files from your pc, and take care to properly safely remove/eject before disabling that and disconnecting the cable from your pc. Better to get a separate reader and install it from the market (e.g., Cool Reader). You can also install the Nook app from the market, but then books need to go within (possibly in a specific subdir) of the "Nook" folder on SDCARD.
So there is no way to use the card memory to store books if I want to use the stock reader??
Should there have been a "NOOK" folder created on the SD card as part of the CM7 process? Is that a file that the user needs to create? If so, does it go in the same partition as the CM7, as that is the only partition my machine is able to see?
thanks again
Hopefully you'll get more input on this, but I think the point of keeping the Nook stock available (aside from not voiding your warranty) relates to use of B&N books. However you can eject your CM sd card and use another sd card if you want more space for user media for use with the stock app. I thought the media drive was the 1gb area, but now I'm not so sure because on mine the MYNOOK disk is much smaller.
When you are in the stock firmware... you are seeing the boot partition of the uSD...
You can write the boot partition... resize it... then run the installer...
I have done it in the past... set up a 2GB boot partition... then setup the ROM on uSD. You then have a 2GB partition you can use when in stock.
Thanks for the info. I am a bit confused by your suggestion, can you please offer a bit more?
By writing the boot partition, then resizing it, does that mean I can resize now, after I have already set everything up? If so, what do you mean by the installer? Or do you mean I have to wipe the card and start over? If that is the case (start over) do you mean wipe the card, create a small partition for the boot to install on? Would that requre the use of an image that is not size agnostic?
Either way, how do I get the file structure in place on the non boot partition for the nook to see files that are saved there?
Thanks again for any help you can provide!
I have never had luck resizing it after it has been booted in the Nook and all the partitions created...
I have written the size agnostic image to the card... resized the only partition created at that point... then put the ROM on it and booted it in the nook so the installer script (size agnostic recovery) can do the partitioning and install the ROM.
For the question of getting the file structure... I'd have to ask how you wrote the files on the uSD... were you CM or stock?
I had always planned on running cm from the card, so when I wrote the files to the card, I was stock.
If I follow what you are saying, then steps for me to try at this point would be:
1. Reformat card
2. Write the disk image to the card
3. Shrink the single partition on the card (where the image is)
4. Add the CM ROM to same partition as the image
5. Install card and boot device
If this sounds right, I have 2 questions.
What size should the partition be for the image and CM ROM, maybe 2GB?
Will the Nook "see" the non-CM partition and create the file structure for saving files on the 2nd partition at some point? In my searches I saw that in early versions, there was a requirement that the 4th partition on the card be expanded to use for storage, won't I only have 2 at this point?
Thanks again so much for the help!
When you write the image to the card... it will only be about 114 MB.... you will probably want to increase the size to avoid any possible size issues later (with ROM's getting larger)
If you plan to use the stock nook ROM as well as CM7... you will probably want 2 GB boot partition... otherwise if you plan to only run CM7 you probably only want about 250 MB.
You can modify vold.fstab on the stock ROM to use partition 4 of the SD for its SD use... then you could avoid the 2 GB boot partition.
What happens when you use VG's SASD... the boot image is about 114 MB... when you boot it in the nook it creates partitions 2, 3 and 4... 2 and 3 are ext3 partitions, partition 4 is fat... partition 4 is the one set for sdcard in the ROM booted from SD...
This is why you can modify stock vold.fstab to point to partition 4... then both ROM's will be putting stuff on the same partition for "SD Card"
I think I follow that, but my issue is that currently I am unable to see partition 2,3 or 4 which I think is part of my problem.
When I set up the card, I used the SASD method, and all I can see in both win explorer and partition software is the single partition on the card. Should there also be partitions 2,3, and 4? Do I have to do something to make those partitions viewable?
I am not comfortable enough with my skill level to attempt to modify the stock vold.fstab file on the device, and was hopeful that by properly setting up the card, I would be able to keep stock as is, and use the card to multipurpose, ie run cm7 on part and use the remaining space on card to store books to be read in stock firmware. I am still hoping to do that....thanks
As far as only seeing partition 1.... that is a limitation of Windows.
By following the advice pertaining to starting over and increasing the size of the Boot partition immediately after writing the image... before doing anything else... you can provide more space for the stock ROM to use on the SD... it will use partiton 1 (the boot partition) without the other modifications to vold.fstab
ok, confused again
If I start over, write image, then resize that partition with the image, am I going to use the "rest" of the card, NOT in that partition to use with storage? OR am I going to resize the partition with the image to be big enough to use as the partition to put books on?
If it is the former, don't I again run into the problem of how to find the other partitions, or will I create them when resize the first partition after writing the image?
Thank you!
You will only ever see the first partition of the sd card when booting from the stock OS. Also with the card inserted in a usb flash card reader on Windows you can only mount the first partition as a drive letter. But you can see and resize partitions with contiguous unallocated space using MiniTools Partition Wizard.
OK thats good to know. Do you know if the SASD install should have created other partitions when I installed to the card? The reason I ask is that even in Partition Wizard, I am still only able to see the 1 large partition with everything in it.
If I start over again, will I need to use the wizard to create partitions first, then write the image to the resized 2 GB first partition, or should I write image to card, resize the first partition? If the latter, will resizing the first partition autmatically force the other partitions to be seen? I am not sure of this option, as I can't see where in the process the other partitions are created? Is this part of the process when CM7 boots?
Thanks!
Write the image. Safely remove from pc. Reinsert to pc. Use minitool partition to resize the (only, at that point) partition to the size you want. Use Apply in minitool software. Quit minitool and resume with the card setup.
does the minitool at that point (resizing) create the other partitions, or will the card setup do that? Do I have to do anything else to the other partitions to make them visable to the stock nook so that they can be used to access books while in stock os?
The card setup will create the other partitions. The stock os is never going to see anything but the 1st partition. You would need a terminal emulator or rooted file explorer installed in the stock os in order to mount another partition.
If that is the case, that stock os will never see anything other than the 1st partition, then there really is no way to accomplish what I am trying to do, correct?
In other words, put CM7 on the card, then when I want to use stock, boot into stock and have the reader find books saved on the card?
This question probably belongs in the thread "[ROMS]NEW! Dualboot Mirage CM7 / ICS CM9 Image for SDcard [3/26]", except that I can't post there yet.
I was able to create a working dual boot card per the instructions. However, I could not make a working card that made use of all 16 GB of my card, rather than just the <4GB size of the image file. The card still worked when I used fdisk on my Mac to increase the size of the last, 'sdcard', partition to fill up the available space. However, that did not increase the capacity of the FAT volume in that partition, leaving the extra space still unavailable.
After saving the files from that volume, I then used the Mac's Disk Utility to erase the partition and re-create it as a FAT partition using all the available space. Once I did that, unfortunately, the Nook would then not recognize anything on the SD card and would only boot into the Nook's own ROM.
As an alternative, I tried leaving the existing partitions alone and editing the MBR with fdisk to create a new partition using the available space, which I then formatted as a FAT partition with Disk Utility. Again, the Nook would no longer recognize the SD card and would only boot into its stock ROM.
I actually tried the above with two 16GB SD cards, a SanDisk Class 4 and a Samsung Class 10, and with two Nooks. Moreover, I tried a number of manipulations of the MBR, mostly to make it identical to the original one except for necessary size changes. Nothing worked to get a card that would boot and use the full 16 GB. I'll admit I haven't tried everything, such as trying to resize to something less than the full 16GB, but I've put so much time into this already that I don't want to do any more until I get some feedback.
aarons510 said:
This question probably belongs in the thread "[ROMS]NEW! Dualboot Mirage CM7 / ICS CM9 Image for SDcard [3/26]", except that I can't post there yet.
I was able to create a working dual boot card per the instructions. However, I could not make a working card that made use of all 16 GB of my card, rather than just the <4GB size of the image file. The card still worked when I used fdisk on my Mac to increase the size of the last, 'sdcard', partition to fill up the available space. However, that did not increase the capacity of the FAT volume in that partition, leaving the extra space still unavailable.
After saving the files from that volume, I then used the Mac's Disk Utility to erase the partition and re-create it as a FAT partition using all the available space. Once I did that, unfortunately, the Nook would then not recognize anything on the SD card and would only boot into the Nook's own ROM.
As an alternative, I tried leaving the existing partitions alone and editing the MBR with fdisk to create a new partition using the available space, which I then formatted as a FAT partition with Disk Utility. Again, the Nook would no longer recognize the SD card and would only boot into its stock ROM.
I actually tried the above with two 16GB SD cards, a SanDisk Class 4 and a Samsung Class 10, and with two Nooks. Moreover, I tried a number of manipulations of the MBR, mostly to make it identical to the original one except for necessary size changes. Nothing worked to get a card that would boot and use the full 16 GB. I'll admit I haven't tried everything, such as trying to resize to something less than the full 16GB, but I've put so much time into this already that I don't want to do any more until I get some feedback.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well you're missing just one step after fdisk. If Disk Utility is failing at it you could try terminal:
First you need to find out where your /sdcard is being mounted at. Use "diskutil list" to find out
Once you find out where it's being mounted (eg. /dev/disk4s7). You will then need to unmount the volumes before you can format it.
Code:
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4s*
$ diskutil partitionDisk "/dev/disk*" 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT32" "sdcard" "*M"
Replace * with the actual values needed. You might need "sudo" to perform the format command. Make sure you're formatting the correct mount point or else you might end up wiping your system. But if you were able to use fdisk, I'm sure you have a good understanding of terminal.
Haven't tried it myself. But it should(might) work.
-Racks
Won't "diskutil partitionDisk ..." wipe out all volumes on disk?
racks11479 said:
[See previous post!]
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When I type
Code:
diskutil partitionDisk
in Terminal to get usage info, I see, inter alia, the following:
Code:
(Re)Partition an existing disk. All volumes on this disk will be destroyed.
But that is clearly not what I want to do. Am I missing something?
Updated update:
I have tried, several times and on both SD cards and both Nooks, diskutil eraseVolume, a presumably more powerful version of the erase option in Disk Utility. I tried one or another of the commands:
Code:
diskutil eraseVolume MS-DOS sdcard /dev/disk4s7
diskutil eraseVolume 'MS-DOS FAT32' sdcard /dev/disk4s7
on cards that were booting, but with the small sdcard partition or the small volume on the enlarged partition. I also tried at least one of those commands on a card that was already not working after modification. In all cases, the commands ran without error but produced a non-booting card. Changing the 'ob' partition id back to 'oc' with fdisk didn't help, nor did any restoration of the original fdisk MBR info.
In sum, the only change that I have been able to make to a card as originally written from the image without making it unbootable was to enlarge the sdcard partition while leaving the sdcard volume untouched, and therefore not using most of the capacity of the partition.
Some more general but related questions.
Since I've got your attention, Racks, let me ask a few questions whose answers might help me and others understand what is going on here and what might go wrong with this and other Nook Color boot setups. Of course, also please point out where anything I think I know is, in fact, wrong.
1) I understand that the firmware boot code on the Nook first looks for something on an inserted SD card to boot from. It seems it looks for a file named u-boot.bin on the first partition of the inserted card to which to transfer control. Does it also check other things on the card before transferring control to u-boot.bin? Does it look at the file MLO? Does it look at the partition labeled sdcard, or at any other partition, before doing so?
2) Presuming that it does transfer control to u-boot.bin, what does the latter check before either booting from the (default) ROM on the card or, if the Home button is being held down, going to the interactive boot dialogue? My experience has been that, when using one of my 'non-working' cards, the Nook goes quickly to the ROM on internal memory without showing any visible signs of doing anything else first. In other words, it 'knows' that it can't boot from a ROM on the sdcard before actually trying to do so.
I have done multiple searches and not found anything like this, apologies if I missed it. Here goes ...
Is their a version of rooting for the Nook N2E that can be run completely from the SD card? (Think a Linux LiveCD) I would like to try some of the other eReader software available to see if I like them before I decide to fully root my Nook. If I knew enough about Android, I would attempt this myself, but I don't want to brick my device.
Currently, no. It is possible, and is widely used on the Nook Color, but the work just hasn't been done on the Nook Touch. There was someone working on it a while ago, but it seems to have been dormant lately...
WIP thread
There appears to be a semi active thread about this here. At least is should provide a starting point.
David0226 said:
There appears to be a semi active thread about this here. At least is should provide a starting point.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can't post on the development forum yet, so I am posting this here hoping others working on an SD boot image will see it.
I have been working on this myself.
I made a backup of my NST and then wrote that image to an SD card (4GB).
I changed the init.rc file and change all the mmcblk0p? file names to mmcblk1p?. I also changed the booting.png image so that I could confirm that my NST was booting from the SD Card.
I than inserted the SD Card and powered up. The booting.png image from the SD card showed up, but the device hung right there.
So I started looking at some other files. There is a file called env.txt that contains the following string:
root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootdelay=1 mem=512M
so I changed that to
root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 rw rootdelay=1 mem=512M
and attempted another boot. It still hung at the booting screen.
I suspect that it may not be able to access all the partitions on the SD card (after writing the backup image to the SD card, it contains 8 partitions, the 7 partitions from the NST and an eighth unallocated partition with the remaining 2GB from the card.)
My next idea is to attempt to get all the files off the SD card and create one partition that contains all the files in their correct directories and comment out the mount and mkdir commands from init.rc to see if I can get it to boot. (My problem is I have no easy access to a Linux system and WinBLOWS will not access the Ext2 and Ext3 partitions.)
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
My goal here is to attempt to get it to boot the "standard" NST firmware and if I get that working, then attempt to set up a "rooted" OS on the SD card.
Progress????
Okay, now I got it to start a boot from the SC card and eventually I got a message that said failure to install.
Here is what I did.
After inserting the SD card into a linux machine, I mounted all the partitions.
I then copied all of the data into a single directory preserving the directory structure from the mounts.
I tar'd up this directory and ftp'd it to my windows machine.
On the Windows machine, I used bootutil to unpack the init.rc and env.txt files from uRamdisk.
I modified the files as can be seen in the attachments and repacked them.
Then I renamed the directories to correspond with the device file names they were supposed to mount from.
Then I created a single FAT partition on the SD Card and copied the directory structure to it.
It did not hang this time, so perhaps I am getting closer.