Revision as of 06:52, 22 October 2010

WARNING: Improper use or installation of the image may harm your device. We do not take any responsibility of the damage that may be caused to your device.

Using Rescue Initrd on N900

This page contains instructions how to use the rescue initrd with the Nokia N900 device. This initrd contains some tools/functions that can be used e.g., to modify content of the external/internal memory cards.

Download required packages

You need flasher, for the very beginning - something like this - read this first.

Get the initrd and kernel images for the rescue process

mkdir n900-rescue-initrd
cd n900-rescue-initrd
wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/1.0.99/1.0.99.2.20101019.1/core/repos/armv7l/packages/armv7l/nokia-n900-rescue-initrd-0.1-2.157.armv7l.rpm
wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/1.0.99/1.0.99.2.20101019.1/core/repos/armv7l/packages/armv7l/kernel-n900-2.6.35.3-10.3.armv7l.rpm

After this you need to extract the kernel and initrd files from the rpm packages

rpm2cpio nokia-n900-*.rpm | cpio -vid ./boot/initrd*
rpm2cpio kernel-n900-*.rpm  | cpio -vid ./boot/vmlinuz*

Now you have a ./boot/ directory in the current dir where the initrd and vmlinuz files are located.

Starting the rescue initrd

NOTE: Here we do not flash the kernel or initrd to the device, but only load them to the device memory during the boot. Original images are restored when the device is restarted.

• Remove the back cover
• Turn off your device by removing battery
• Insert the battery back to the device
• Put back cover to the device (This is not needed if you don't need to have access to the microsd card, or if you use magnet instead).
• Start flasher with the following command (NOTE: change <vmlinuz-n900> and <initrd.img> to real filenames):

sudo flasher-3.5 -k boot/<vmlinuz-n900> -n boot/<initrd.img> -l -b"rootdelay=1 root=/dev/ram0"

• Connect N900 to your PC with the USB cable (directly ! some HUBS may cause strange problems)

Now the device boots and you can see a rescue menu.

Rescue Menu Functionalities

With rescue menu you can:

• Toggle USB networking on/off (N)
• Reboot the device (R)
• Shutdown the device (S)
• Start recovery terminal (T)
  • Contains busybox functionality
• Toggle USB storage mode on/off (U)