no boot on Kobo Glo

[sorenpeter]

I tried installing okreader to a sd card as instruced, but nothing is displayed on the screen and the LED just keeps flashing green.

im not using the original SD, but i made a dd from it and was able to boot from it before i started editing the partitions with parted.

First i tried the latest build (a9bf918_build, april 4) and the i tried the 1e7825eb3111_auto_build, which dtamas reported he got working on a Kobo Glo.

About the 15 MiB on my orignial SD: there only seem to be apx. 9MiB before the first partition:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      9961kB  546MB   536MB   primary  ext4
 3      547MB   1978MB  1431MB  primary  fat32

I have also tried insert the original sd and boot okreader from the external slot, but it is the same, just a blank screen and LED flashes green.

Did I miss some step or info or do you have any other ideas for how it can make it work?

[lgeek]

That's interesting, is that the partition layout on the factory SD? If it is, you also seem to be missing the recovery partition (2). I think 9961kB might be large enough to fit all the resources which go before the Linux partition.

Do you by any chance have a 3.3V UART adapter? The SoC's serial port is brought out to a 2.54mm header on the board. You get the output from U-Boot's and the kernel there, which should help to troubleshoot your issue.

[sorenpeter]

no that is the layout after i removed the recovery partion and extended the first partion. i inclued it mostly for showing the start of the first partition, which is the same on the factory SD.

I dont have a 3.3V UART adapter, but i can try to get my hands on one if that is the only thing to try.

[lgeek]

@espete Got it. With a serial adapter you can normally see exactly what's going on, otherwise you're stuck making educated guesses until something works.

Something you could try is to use binwalk and a hex editor to confirm that the offset of the various resources before the first partition matches the ones give in the okreader readme (See Notes for developers). If they don't, then you might need to dd u-boot and the uImage to different addresses.

IIRC the factory Kobo kernel can boot okreader (without WiFi and USB storage), so you could also try to only replace the contents of the first partition from to the factory image and see if that works.

[mgustafs]

@espete I was in the same situation as you, that is, I only had 9.5MiB before partition 1, but I managed to get my Glo working. Here is how: After removing partition 2 and before extending partition 1, I moved partition 1 using gparted so that 15MiB became free before it. Other than that, I followed the installation instructions using the latest release (a9bf918_build from April 4). As far as I can tell, everything is working as expected, including front light, wifi and USB mode.

I hope this helps you or anyone else who got stuck because of the 9.5MiB issue.

[mathgamain]

To what it is worth, this problem doesn't seem related to free space available before first partition(both 10mb and 15mb) it is related to newer mkfs, look at #17 I had this exact same problem with a kobo glo and previously with a kobo mini, what I did was using an older mkfs version (I believe from util-linux 2.24) and it worked like a charm for both.