Booting a PC with a SD-card in Pandora running MassStorageMode


lomaxx

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Sep 22, 2008
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Has someone ever managed to insert a bootable-SD-card into the Pandora, enable mass-storage-mode, connect it to a PC/laptop/netbook/... and make it boot that SD-card? I tried it with a card that is correctly booted when inserted into some separate USB-cardreader, but when using the pandora for it, no usb-device is shown in the boot-menu of the PC i tested it on.


I also tried fiddling with the kernel-module-parameters of g_file_storage, but without success. I only found a way to run the mass-storage-mode in read-only mode, which is also somewhat interesting as you can offer your data to someone without the risk of getting files deleted/changed.


As for the booting-issue: My guess is that either the PC i tried it with is incompatible or it's not possible at all.


Maybe a newer kernel/kernel-module would work. Would be nice for setting up an SD-card with a a grub-menu, a couple of partitions containing live-OS-images like knoppix, grml, clonezilla, anti-vir-CDs... and use it on demand for booting some system.
 
That would be so slow you can probably only use floppy images off of it. High speed flash drives have trouble with live CD's. The Pandora in mass storage mode usually sits around 350 - 800 kb/s transfer speed.
 
I get 10MB/sec download from Pandora SD over Mass storage mode to my PC. :) This is more than my SD Card reader was able to offer - with the same SD cards of course. ^^


Oh, besides, how can I acess the Pandora NAND over mass storage mode? I only have access to the SDs but NAND would be also nice for Backup and so on.
 
Concerning booting: SD in Mass Storage mode on a Pandora running OS 1.6 did not appear on the boot menu device list of a ThinkPad Z60m.


Concerning speed: At least I can report something at little better than @Darkknight512.


Average writing speed rate of 4.09 MB/sec while copying 7 files, 4620 MB in total.


Patriot 16GB MicroSDHC card, formatted as FAT32, connected via OpenPandora in Mass Storage mode to a MacBook Pro Late 2006.
 
Thanks for the feedback.


@Fusion_Power: I'm not sure if it works to directly put nand into mass-storage-mode, but here is a way to do it in two steps:


First of all, it's cleaner to backup the nand when the Pandora is not running from nand-memory. So i recommend to boot the system from an sd-card. Then follow:


http://pandorawiki.o...Access_the_NAND


Once done, backup the content to a also mounted sd-card and once your done either mount the sd-card in mass-storage-mode to copy it to your backupmachine, or if your pandora and your backupmachine are in a network, use sshfs to mount a remote-directory over ssh and copy it to (or read it from) there. The later one is a bit more advanced (see http://pandorawiki.org/Mount_over_ssh).


As an example for sshfs to a linux-pc: I do connect my Pandora to my PC by using the usb-cable, start dropbear (ssh-server) and usb-networking (whith pre-configured network-settings), then run "modprobe fuse" (if fuse-module is not alreay loaded) and type "sshfs lomaxx@linuxpc:/mnt/backups/pandora /mnt/tmp" on my pandora (where /mnt/tmp is an existing, empty directory). Now i can copy/read what ever i need to /mnt/tmp which actually is on my linuxpc in /mnt/backups/pandora.


Anyway, back to backing up: In order to copy all on nand to a sd-card, i can not reccomend to just copy the files with cp or a filemanager. This might (or will) change timestamps, rights and ownerships. The clean way should be:


- boot system from sd-card


- open a terminal and switch to root ("sudo su")


- mount nand (see link above)


- change to the nand-directory (for example /mnt/nand)


- example for a backup with tar: type (don't forget the " . " (<space><dot><space>) after the filename) :



Code:
tar czf /<path to your sd-card>/fullnand_backup_20111023.tar.gz .  --one-file-system



And to unpack that tarball, go to the directory where you want to restore the files to ( for example /mnt/nand/) and write





Code:
tar xzf /<path to your sd-card>/fullnand_backup_20111023.tar.gz --numeric-owner


I hope I am not spreading any false information, but this should be a clean way to backup/restore files. Someone please correct me if i am wrong. Using rsync would be another way, which i am not really experienced with.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Bump!


Just wanted to say that I tried this successfully today. I prepared my SD card from within Windows XP (and incidentally, with the card mounted via the Pandora) using this: http://goebelmeier.de/bootstick/


Rebooted, did a quick check of the BIOS to make sure USB device was at the top of the boot list, and voila. FreeDOS running from the Pandora. I don't know if I'd want to run a full blown distro this way, but I'd like to experiment with some other lightweight stuff. Maybe I'll even find a use for it. :p


Any suggestions?
 
Great ^^.


Good to use for booting g4l, the Linux hard drive cloning tool.
 
UBCD could be good too. Any number of tools like that I guess.


It crossed my mind that it would be cool to plug your portable DOS game collection into a PC now and then, to play them natively without any Windows rubbish in the way.


Then I had this crazy idea where you could be running DOSBox on the Pandora from SD1, with a PC running FreeDOS from SD2, and have two players going head to head via netplay or something. From the same Pandora. B)


That might be a little too crazy though.
 
Hmmm, it would be even more awesome to mount an image to the mass storage output of the Pandora, so download UBCD or G4L ISO image on your SD Card, connect Pandora to the USB port and boot on your PC :)
 
Bump!


Just wanted to say that I tried this successfully today. I prepared my SD card from within Windows XP (and incidentally, with the card mounted via the Pandora) using this: http://goebelmeier.de/bootstick/


Rebooted, did a quick check of the BIOS to make sure USB device was at the top of the boot list, and voila. FreeDOS running from the Pandora. I don't know if I'd want to run a full blown distro this way, but I'd like to experiment with some other lightweight stuff. Maybe I'll even find a use for it. :p


Any suggestions?
(I was searching for another things but this conversation was new to me...)

So this actually works ?!  :eek:

I need to experiment more with those gadgets...
 
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