Release ISO Optical Drive


Yeah, having a "compatibility list" :D can be useful.

I have also a thing I was working on but never finished... maybe I should find the will... I was trying to make an USB stick with PLOP to use it as bootloader instead of the one on the BIOS (without making changes on the machine itself), to see if it was able to load the emulated CD rom at the start.

Now there are also PCs with that UEFI thing that seems unable to load anything if you didn't do it from the OS...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The few UEFI/BIOS i looked into have some kind of UEFI disable setting in them, switching back to a normal BIOS.

If you want to look at different methods to create bootable usb sticks, take a look at Slacko:

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy53

The included tools are very complete and helped me to boot tricky computers.
 
Hey, it's small !! :D

Thanks for the info, I'll give a look at it.
 
The PND just calls a function that's in the kernel, so there's nothing that can be made to adjust it...

Someone should patch the SZ kernel itself to make this working... and I'm not the right one :(
 
Or can we try another Way?
I can try to make an Empty File with e.g. 1GB and mount that empty File.
Now i can copy a Iso with DiskDump into this Empty File
and try to boot it not as CDROM....can we boot it as USB Drive then?
 
well... you have some imagination :D

You can just try with the normal Mass Storage function... but I tried that too years ago, and doesn't work either... those gadgets were not designed to be used as a boot device from the beginning
 
It seems this PND is using g_file_storage, which even in our old 3.2 kernel is marked as deprecated in favor of g_mass_storage. g_file_storage was completely removed in 3.8. Maybe g_mass_storage would work better?
 
notaz said:
It seems this PND is using g_file_storage, which even in our old 3.2 kernel is marked as deprecated in favor of g_mass_storage. g_file_storage was completely removed in 3.8. Maybe g_mass_storage would work better?
Click to expand...

Seems like in the past I already tried that:
https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/iso-optical-drive.68475/page-4#post-1161584

Do you think g_mass_storage could have been changed after these years ? Anyway, I'm unable to try, my Pandora is not usable :(
 
@ingoreis : the display died like 3 years ago and I still have to send to repair... (It's just the LCD cable, but I don't want to deal with repairing) (luckily the ssh was still set, so I used it for years from the pc, but mostly as a downloader... anyway it's not updated because if something goes wrong and I lose the connectivity or ssh settings I'm lost)
I was anyway using it too much at the time (really, really too much), so I found the time to do all the other things I wanted to do... I'm one of those "the glass is half full" people :D

Anyway I suppose it's myself that have to be repaired first... I just suck at sending things :D
 
ingoreis said:
Or can we try another Way?
I can try to make an Empty File with e.g. 1GB and mount that empty File.
Now i can copy a Iso with DiskDump into this Empty File
and try to boot it not as CDROM....can we boot it as USB Drive then?
Click to expand...
Yep, doing that works just fine.

Create an empty sparse file 1G in size:
Code: 
truncate -s 1G disk.img
NOTE: sparse files don't take space until they are filled with data, pretty useful feature

Change the mountisodrive.sh script of the ISO Optical Drive to and remove the cdrom parameter:
Code: 
modprobe g_file_storage file="${selection}" stall=0
NOTE: Do this while the PND is mounted/running by editing /mnt/utmp/iso_optical_drive/mountisodrive.sh. The modified file automatically lands in /media/SDCARD/pandora/appdata/iso_optical_drive/mountisodrive.sh while the file in PND remains unmodified. To reverse the modification simply delete /media/SDCARD/pandora/appdata/iso_optical_drive/mountisodrive.sh.

Mount the disk image file created in the first step and then plug USB cable into PC. Now you can format the USB drive (ie. the disk image) using the PC. Could even use a Windows machine and format as NTFS. Or make any kind of partitions, etc. It's indistinguishable from a regular USB drive.
 
PowerGod said:
You can just try with the normal Mass Storage function... but I tried that too years ago, and doesn't work either... those gadgets were not designed to be used as a boot device from the beginning
Click to expand...
I've just tried booting Debian image on my PC (with g_file_storage on pandora) and it booted fine. What were you trying to boot?

Maybe it also depends on how good the PC BIOS is and what commands it sends.
 
Hi can you share the exact Command for my Bash?
What for an Image did you use exactly?
We want to boot from Iso Files.
For installing Linux on an PC from the Pandora :D

Maybe we can fix then with the right Command the Iso Optical Drive PND.

I will try the Good Hint from Yoyobua soon too :D
 
ingoreis said:
Thank you i will try it this Evening.
Yehaah sound realy good :D
Click to expand...

HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????
HAVE YOU TRIED ????

:p
 
notaz said:
The image I was testing was http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.5.0/amd64/iso-cd/debian-8.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso with these commands:
Code: 
sudo rmmod g_cdc
sudo modprobe g_file_storage file=/media/fat/tmp/debian-8.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso cdrom=1
Click to expand...

At the time I used the same command, and tried to boot Knoppix/SystemRescueCD/Debian/Ubuntu and maybe also Puppy, but the BIOS was always ignoring the Pandora as a boot device... I had an HP zd8000 pc with windows xp, and all the previous distributions were starting if put on a CD or on a usbstick with softwares like LinuxLive.
 
I've noticed that if you reboot a PC, at the moment the PC resets pandora's OTG sometimes gets knocked off and won't work until cable replug. To get around that you have to plug the pandora in at the time window between the actual PC reset (when other USB device LEDs go out for a short time) and when it's BIOS scans for boot devices, then it does work 100% for me.
 
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