sd_installer.pnd (install OS on SD card) - problems!

[hmc]

Hi guys,


is the maintainer of sd_installer.pnd, Dave1234, here?


I have some problems with the installer. Albeit it's an excellent tool, making installation much more convenient than doing it manually...


I didn't succeed trying to install the HF6 firmware on my 16GB SD card (left slot, 10.5GB FAT, 128MB swap, remaining space as boot partition).


Problem #1:


An error message, quite at the end of the installation process:


"Error: Could not remove boot directory.


rm: cannot remove 'ext/boot/uImage-2.6.27.46-omap1': Read-only file system


rm: cannot remove 'ext/boot/uImage': Too many levels of symbolic links"


I assume the second is a result of the first error.


I clicked "OK" and the installation silently finished.


Problem #2:


When booting from the SD card, I only get a blank (black) screen.


The Pandora logo is shown, then the screen goes and stays black.


Question #1:


Is there any reason the kernel is installed on the FAT partition and not on the ext2 root partition? When doing that manually, I always installed the kernel on the root partition (which then was the boot partition, too) without a problem. The kernel loading autoboot.txt line needs to be changed then from


"fatload mmc 0:1 0x80300000 uImage"


to


"ext2load mmc 0:2 0x80300000 /boot/uImage"


Except there is a good reason against this variant, I prefer that way, because when accidentally deleting / moving the kernel on the FAT partition using the Mac or Windows PC, the Pandora won't boot anymore with that SD card...


Question #2:


Dave1234, did you make sure that LEFT and RIGHT slot are always correctly assigned to the device nodes in the script? Usually, /dev/mmcblk0 is the left slot, but I just had the situation that this device node is assigned to the right slot. If that assignment is fixed (LEFT to mmcblk0 and RIGHT to mmcblk1), it may happen that the wrong card is repartitioned...


Thanks a lot,


Daniel

 

[lomaxx]

Question #2:


Dave1234, did you make sure that LEFT and RIGHT slot are always correctly assigned to the device nodes in the script? Usually, /dev/mmcblk0 is the left slot, but I just had the situation that this device node is assigned to the right slot. If that assignment is fixed (LEFT to mmcblk0 and RIGHT to mmcblk1), it may happen that the wrong card is repartitioned...

This one is very tricky. Be careful to remember the following: mmcblk0 is NOT bound to the left card and mmcblk1 NOT bound to the right card. They are assigned depending on which card is inserted first.


If you boot your system from SD-card, then you are safe, as the right card will always be mmcblk1. But when booting from NAND then this is not always the case.


btw, it seems like I found a reliable way to detected the mmcblk-device of the left/right slot, which i am using in my mount-menu-scripts. Either get them from repo and browse the scripts or let me know if there is an interest for them and i will post the related lines.

 

[Dave1234]

Problem #1:


An error message, quite at the end of the installation process:


"Error: Could not remove boot directory.


rm: cannot remove 'ext/boot/uImage-2.6.27.46-omap1': Read-only file system


rm: cannot remove 'ext/boot/uImage': Too many levels of symbolic links"


I assume the second is a result of the first error.


I clicked "OK" and the installation silently finished.

This happens when there is a write error when copying files to the card. Linux remounts the card read only so further write operations fail.


Write errors are usually caused by faulty or incompatible SD cards.

Problem #2:


When booting from the SD card, I only get a blank (black) screen.


The Pandora logo is shown, then the screen goes and stays black.

This is because the installation did not complete (see above).

Question #1:


Is there any reason the kernel is installed on the FAT partition and not on the ext2 root partition? When doing that manually, I always installed the kernel on the root partition (which then was the boot partition, too) without a problem. The kernel loading autoboot.txt line needs to be changed then from


"fatload mmc 0:1 0x80300000 uImage"


to


"ext2load mmc 0:2 0x80300000 /boot/uImage"


Except there is a good reason against this variant, I prefer that way, because when accidentally deleting / moving the kernel on the FAT partition using the Mac or Windows PC, the Pandora won't boot anymore with that SD card...

The kernel is on the FAT partition because booting with it on the EXT partition did not work with early versions of the boot loader.

Question #2:


Dave1234, did you make sure that LEFT and RIGHT slot are always correctly assigned to the device nodes in the script? Usually, /dev/mmcblk0 is the left slot, but I just had the situation that this device node is assigned to the right slot. If that assignment is fixed (LEFT to mmcblk0 and RIGHT to mmcblk1), it may happen that the wrong card is repartitioned...

Yes, this is something that the script checks for.

 

[hmc]

OK, thank you David!


I can confirm now that the "rm" error was caused by the SD card partition being remounted read-only. This also happened now when I tried the installation manually.


I remember that this has happened to me in the past a few times with other SD cards.


I suggest that you add some recognition for this kind of error and display an according error message suggesting to check dmesg for "Remounting filesystem read-only" and "EXT3-fs error" strings. It seems that this kind of problem happens quite often.


In stalling on another SD card succeeded now.


Daniel


P.S.:


I have updated the Wiki page about installing OS on SD, mentioning your great tool:


http://pandorawiki.org/Running_Linux_from_an_SD_card#Copy_and_boot

 

[steveway]

I had those errors with several different SD-cards.


Happens with (normally) perfectly good cards from Panasonic, Intenso and Kingston.


Try some cards from Sandisk. They work the best on the Pandora.

 

[Dave1234]

Try some cards from Sandisk. They work the best on the Pandora.

That's what I use. Also, it seems that the larger capacity cards have the most problems.

 

[hmc]

hm... my card causing this problem was a Transcend 16GB Class 6.


Now, with a (temporarily used) relatively cheap Hama 32GB Class 4 it seems to work, although I had I/O errors with this card on the Mac some time ago.


Will need to buy a really good Sandisk card ASAP.

 

[kuru]

I get an error message that it couldn't unzip the rootfs file. Neither the one already on my SD which I zipped up for the tool, nor the one freshly downloaded. How am I messing up this time?

Edit: SZ1.53, updating ...

 

[bukkit]

Would be great if the SD installer could install on preformatted SD cards. I spend quite some effort aligning the partitions for speed - and that's rather welcome when an OS boots - but SD installer destroys those, which is a pity.

Fixing the alignment with gparted is arduous and error-prone, alas. So that would be a nice feature, I believe.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

How do you find the correct alignment ?

Did you tried the sl4p pack ?

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=sl4p_pack