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
Login via ssh to your n900 and:
# Get the bootmenu package 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.
