N2 Boot Sequence

Its this image from Merveric: https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=246536#p246536
Do you need dmesg log or something else?
One more thing i can say: it starts reading boot.ini from usb stick because resolution changes to the value i set in boot.ini on the stick.

I’ve tried to run the image “Debian-Stretch64-1.0.1-20190519-N2.img.xz” and got booted by Petitboot. What I did is I flash the image to my USB stick with “dd” and just plugged in to USB, then boot from Petitboot. After finishing the first boot, it works.

It would be great if you can share the logs, then I will look into it or just copy whole files in the first partition and send me, I will try on my image as well.

Thank you for your test. So we will this get working too. You are amazing!
I’m going to try etcher instead of odroids disc imager. If it does not work I will give you the files on Sunday.

it works! i just had to use etcher.
one more question: will it be possible to store petitboot.cfg on usb-stick? atm it will be ignored.

edit: i was wrong it was just luck with etcher: it crashes boot process if other USB Storages (HDD NTFS/EXT4) are connected. If a second USB stick (FAT32) is connected it is booting fine

I don’t get it, the USB stick with ext4 cannot boot up while with FAT32 can? Do you use the same USB disk?
ATM, I have no plan to store the config to any other place instead of SD instead I will focus to store it to eMMC such that eventually no additional storage is required.

OK. config on eMMC would be even better. thank you!
FAT32/ext4 are different devices. could you help me to get the right logfile created?
what i got:
USB-HDD 1: NTFS
USB-HDD 2: ext4
USB-Stick 1: Debian Stretch i want to boot from
USB-Stick 2: FAT32

what is working:
USB-Stick 1 + USB-Stick 2

what is NOT working:
USB-Stick 1 + USB-HDD 1 + USB-HDD 2

Seriously??? 3 USB disk at the same time? To be honest, there are couple of reports that USB 3.0 stability issue and the problem is being tested. That’s why I suspect one reason is two USB-HDD drives are not working and curious what about USB-Stick1 + USB-HDD1. Also wonder what are the vendors and the models of USB-HDD1/2.

its not a problem for me in my use-case i want use two devices only at the same time - that is working fine.
i just wanted to reproduce the problem and this was just an “accident” all drives were connected on my powered 7port USB3 hub. i have two use cases:
CoreELEC:

  1. USB-HDD1 movies and music
  2. USB-HDD2 tv-record/timeshift

Debian Stretch:

  1. USB-Stick 1: bootmedia and FoFiX
  2. USB-Stick 2: music for FoFiX

and because its so easy to switch bootmedia now i forgot to switch off the HDDs and the problem occured.

I’m a bit lost, what’s the problem now to resolve? :thinking:

Its not a poblem for me anymore as i can boot debian stretch from the USB-Stick

Good to hear it’s not a problem any more, by the way which Debian did you install and how? Can you share with me?

this image:
https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=246536#p246536
flashed with etcher to a USB-Stick

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I’ve made something you might be interesting to install two OS images into a single eMMC and run individually after booting by Petitboot. So you must not need to install one OS to eMMC and CoreELEC to SD, for example. If you have large enough eMMC, you can install both OS to eMMC and can use SD as an external storage for each OS.

Since I am not very good at writing and am non-English speaker, the article would be a bit awkward or hard to understand. :slight_smile:

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excellent… i can’t test it as my units won’t be here till thursday, but nicely written and as a english speaker can say i have no problem following that at all…

nice work…

Great guide!
I will test this certainly when my new N2 will arrive in a few days…
:smiley:

So I read here that the N2 is capable of booting from USB. I naively tried this by unplugging my uSD, putting it in a USB reader and attaching it to the USB port. But then, the N2 does not boot.

Is it possible to boot CoreELEC from USB without a valid uSD card? Do I have to use petitboot in SPI and then forward the boot to USB somehow? The reason I ask is, because I’d like to have a fully encrypted uSD (or eMMC) and then use the USB as a boot medium to unlock the encrypted drive and continue booting from there.

Currently, it works the other way around (i.e. boot from uSD and have an encrypted USB), but I’d like to reverse.

EDIT: actually, it is probably better to boot from USB anyways, since it looks (from what I’ve read) to be faster than uSD (at least if you use a fast USB 3 capable drive) on the N2

If you have not tried to run Petitboot, please give it a try. If you connect USB stick with bootable OS, N2 will show you the OS entry and you can boot up from USB stick.

I’ve read through this thread and tried to understand as much as I could but I’m new to Linux so I don’t think I’ve grasped everything.

Right now I’m looking to purchase the N2 to replace my current S912 Android box. What would be the best option to dual boot Android and CE since it looks like the method linked here doesn’t allow you to install Android.

I’ve added the ODROID-N2 4GB CoreELEC Edition and a 16GB eMMC Module N2 Android to my cart, but before I purchase I want to make sure I have everything I need to dual boot correctly.

Do I need to consider anything else?

Id does. You can have Android installed on eMMC and CoreElec on uSD or USB. Then you can use dual boot. You select which OS to boot via SPI-Petitboot.

Do you have this working? It’s just that point 1 of the technical limitations of this method states the following -

“Android image from Hardkernel cannot be composed with. This is because of the Android image store the image files in raw sectors rather than file system due to its original development behavior. The current dual-OS script is not supposed to compose the Android image.”

I was just basing my question off this point so if this is now working then I guess that solves the problem :slight_smile: