I wondering if I can ask a related question to putting your PND into further useage here, so I apologise for slight OT but you'll hopefully see my reasoning and you seem to be the man in the know over images and SD boot set-ups?
Your PND worked fine for making HF4 and HF5 cards and I was hoping to image the SD card on a windows PC with Acronis True Image which is a linux based program that I use to backup my PC and restore the HDD if anything goes bonkers. I've never had issue with it but also never used it on SD cards.
It copies the HF4/5 cards fine and re-stores them fine as far as its concerned but they don't boot. They still offer the option to boot from SD 1:1 and initially begin the process but then it black screens and does nothing. Perhaps not necessary as the PND process you have made is pretty fast for making a fresh vanilla HF4/5 SD card anyway but the windows acronis process is only about 2 minutes to restore the card, so it is faster.
Anyway as that doesnt work (not your scope) I wanted to capture my current NAND HF4 tweaked set-up to a bootable SD card. So I'm currently doing this (which takes ages):
OR copy your firmware from the NAND to the SD card
The following will ask for your password. All the operations need root permissions so I thought it would be wasteful to sprinkle sudo to everything. We will bind mount the root fs to an alternative location ("/mp"), under which other filesystems mounted under root (like the kernel virtual filesystems /proc and /sys, and your SD card.) wont be visible. This allows us to take a live copy of the NAND contents to the SD filesystem.
Code:
sudo su
mkdir /mp
mount --bind / /mp
cp -va /mp/* /media/<SD card>
umount /mp
rmdir /mp
exit
Seems to be working and if it does, I would then like to copy that from the dumped 2gb SD card to a fresh 32gb one (merging my 2 16gb cards data to it) by using your SD Installer PND to create a 2-3gb EXT3 partition, a 1gb swap and the rest as FAT for PND data etc.
So to cut a long story short (too late..thud)...
Is it possible to make a tar.bz2 file from the dumped NAND contents that will work with your PND as though it is a fresh HF4/5 install?
If so, how do I go about that?
Then I can start looking into setting up a dev environment to attempt to learn about porting apps by following Mcobits' and others guides and hopefully give something back beyond compatibility listings, attempted help tips in the support section and jesting Prometheus or weird rambling posts when I'm drunk
The efforts of Mcobit, Sebt3, Coldbird, Alerino, Gregor, WizardStan, The PandoraPress crew, OPT of course and many many more, are inspiring and a new hobby/skill seems something Pandora is offering, that would be a wasted opportunity to not embrace.
