Hack-A-N900/Usb Recovery Mode
I bricked my maemo setup several times. Often the underlying problem would have been trivial to fix, if i had a way to access the rootfs. Patching bootmenu enables us to boot a minimal system with just usb network and sshd enabled. that's still not optimal because this solution relies on rootfs being accessible. why? - 1 2 - in short, during boot process no seperate initrd is utilized - in fact the rootfs is misused for it -.- . the bootmenu script circumvents that by redirecting the pivot_root call issued by /sbin/preinit, which is a pretty dirty - yet effective hack. hmmm... just an idea, but why not use the rootfs for initrd purposes only?... sshd will be using settings from the rootfs.
Prerequisites
- First Steps
- Development - Software sources for apt, installing "patch".
Login via ssh to your n900 and:
# Get the bootmenu package: wget http://www.daimi.au.dk/~cvm/bootmenu_1.6_armel.deb # Install bootmenu package dpkg -i bootmenu_1.6_armel.deb # Install bootmenu script install_bootmenu
Patch bootmenu.sh to fix key bindings and enable usb recovery mode
cd / wget http://metalab.at/wiki/images/4/40/Bootmenu_n900usbrecov.patch patch -p0 < Bootmenu_n900usbrecov.patch
If you like you can edit /bootmenu.conf and adjust the ip address the usb interface will start with in recovery mode:
# IP address for USB networking USB_IP=192.168.2.15
Enable R&D mode and disable watchdogs
Enable flasher mode and execute following on your pc:
./flasher-3.5 --set-rd-flags=no-omap-wd ./flasher-3.5 --set-rd-flags=no-ext-wd ./flasher-3.5 --enable-rd-mode
Boot into recovery mode
Reboot the device with the keyboard slide out(!). When the boot menu appears you can either select a boot entry or press "CTRL" to boot usb recovery mode.
