am I doing it wrong?

[atraub2012]

Hey everybody,


I've had my Pandora for about a year now, but due to a lot of frustrations when I first got it, I'm only now really getting into it. The first thing I did was put the firmware on a 16 SD card, I figured I didn't want to run into NAND troubles and the walkthrough seemed pretty easy.


I set it all up, included an autoboot file, and everything appears to be working properly. When My Pandora boots up, it does say I'm using Zax hotfix 5, so I think it works. I next tried getting an emulator to work, and for the first time since I got my Pandora, I got an SNES emulator to run (Thank you Yoshi's emulator pack). My Pandora currently has 2 SD cards, 1 for the OS, and 1 for just about everything else. When I tried to load a ROM, I noticed that I had to navigate pretty far to get to it from the snes screen. I feel like it might not be a bad idea to make a roms folder on my OS SD card and keep my roms there, if for no reason beyond easy navigation.


^Skip to here for my problem lol^


Here's the rub, even though the OS is running from a 16 gig Card that has no partitions, I was unable to copy files to it because (and I could be wrong) the Pandora thinks that the card doesn't have any extra space.


Is it a bad idea to put files on the OS SD card? Is there something wrong with the new firmware I installed (I also can't go from xfce to minmenu, I keep getting an error)? I'm not even 100% sure it really is booting from the SD card at this point, how can I confirm it worked?


Thanks for your help guys.

 

[TrashyMG]

You can run into some file permission problems when dealing with an ext2 or ext3 formatted SD card, which most likely what your OS Card is formatted to. I generally keep all the pandora PNDs and apps and such on a Fat32 partition on the SD card.. It makes things simpler...


Honestly booting from the NAND is perfectly fine.. Just don't overload it with unnecessary files.. there is only 512megs of storage on it.. perfect for the OS.. put everything else on SD cards.

 

[atraub2012]

Haha I wish I had thought to partition it, then I could load files onto it using my windows pc.

 

[notaz]

I don't see any real reason to run from SD unless you want to install heaps of Angstrom packages (that would not fit otherwise) or experiment with OS. Pandora uses ubifs for it's NAND which writes to different block each time (even if you overwrite a file), there have been no reports of weared down flash over whole pandora's existence.

 

[atraub2012]

I figured it would eliminate the possibility of accidentally filling up the NAND, plus I wanted to update to the latest hotfix anyways. I guess I'll just update the firmware on it and go back to using my card as storage. Thanks for the suggestion.


Incidentally, my Pandora's battery seems to be draining really fast. I haven't even started doing anything really useful on it yet, but I'm only getting about 3 or 4 hours worth of use while the lid is opened. Is there anything involving the hotfixes that could be causing this? I want to be able to take my Pandora backpacking, so I want to do all I can to minimize the number of times it needs charged.


I figure I can

• turn off wifi when it's not in use
  
• lower the CPU speed (for now the most intense thing I want to do is gba emulation, how low of a speed do you think I can get away with?)
  
• decrease the screen brightness
  

that's all I got so far, any other ideas?

 

[mcobit]

Just use the newest firmware and :


close the lid -> over a day usage


Put into sleep mode -> several days standby time

 

[atraub2012]

Alright, I'll update the firmware on the NAND and let you guys know how it's going.