can't boot XO-1 from USB, doc needed

[James Cameron]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 04:12:50PM -0800, S Page wrote:
> I wanted to try 11.3.0 but my XO-1 prints scary JFFS2 warnings before
> "Boot has failed, sleeping forever.".  (After four years, no more
> olpc-update for me.)

That sounds fixable.  Can you describe how you got to this point?

> I'd like to boot off USB and look at my XO-1's NAND filesystem. But
> the wiki instructions for booting off USB[1] were out of date.

I would use http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tiny_Core_Linux to boot from USB
and investigate the cause:

# cat /proc/mtd0
# mount -t jffs2 mtd0 /mnt

I would also make a backup using the xo-backup tool included on the Tiny
Core Linux build modified for XO-1.  This is documented for XO-1.5 at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_backup_your_XO#XO-1.5 but ought to work
in a similar fashion for XO-1 ... if you mount the jffs2 filesystem
instead.

> * Can I jump through hoops to mount the JFFS2 .img and transfer its
> contents (cpio?) to an ext3 partition?

Yes, except it isn't an .img.

> * I created an ext3 partition named OLPCRoot and used
>     sudo tar --lzma --numeric-owner -xvf /path/to/os883.tree.tar.lzma
>   to extract the build's files.  But the tree doesn't have /boot ,
> initrd, or actrd?!

Yes, the .tar.lzma does not have boot files in /boot, you need to create
the symlink to the versioned boot directory.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/