Mount NAND flash via FEL

[PsychoDealer]

Can someone please give me specific instructions on mounting cubieboard's nand flash to my pc via the micro-usb port(in FEL mode), so i can edit android's script.bin ?
Also, when i connect cubie to my pc(Win7 Ultimate x64) in FEL mode, windows shows it as unknown device and can't find any driver via windows update. Is there any solution to?

[Simos Xenitellis]

AFAIK, the NAND flash is accessible through a (possibly) proprietary
protocol, and you can write to it with LiveSuit,
which is available from http://cubieboard.org/download/ or
http://linux-sunxi.org/LiveSuit
There is probably no (Windows) driver for the access to the NAND
flash, so this is where LiveSuit comes in.
The above links point to a LiveSuit 1.02; there is a 1.07 on the
Internets that for some people works better.

An alternative to LiveSuit is PhoenixCard, http://linux-sunxi.org/PhoenixCard
You convert the LiveSuit image to a special form and then write to a
microSD card. Then boot the microSD card and the NAND memory is
updated.

Thefore, if you want to change a file in the NAND memory, you need to
edit and then recreate a LiveSuit image, and finally install it.
There is a way to create LiveSuit images, however I do not have the link handy.

Simos

[Henrik Nordström]

mån 2013-01-28 klockan 21:25 +0200 skrev Simos Xenitellis:

> AFAIK, the NAND flash is accessible through a (possibly) proprietary
> protocol, and you can write to it with LiveSuit,

Actually FEL is even simpler than that. FEL as such knows nothing about
NAND. All it knows is "write to addresss", "read from address", and
"execute code at address".

What LiveSuit does is that it sends a number of small programs over FEL
to the device and executes those to first initialize the hardware and
then sends over it's flasher application which knows how to access the
NAND. LiveSuit then sends the image to be flashed to this program which
performs the actual writing to NAND.

> An alternative to LiveSuit is PhoenixCard, http://linux-sunxi.org/PhoenixCard
> You convert the LiveSuit image to a special form and then write to a
> microSD card. Then boot the microSD card and the NAND memory is
> updated.

PhoenixCard is pretty much the same flashing application but loaded via
SD instead of FEL.

> Thefore, if you want to change a file in the NAND memory, you need to
> edit and then recreate a LiveSuit image, and finally install it.

Or change the file from Linux on the device itself. You can currently
change anything except for the boot blocks.

> There is a way to create LiveSuit images, however I do not have the link handy.

There is several ways

a) Use Allwinners tools for creating a livesuit image, found in the SDK.

b) Use one of the third-party image extractor & repacker tools.

Regards
Henrik

[bossesand]

I wanted to upgrade my recently recived cubieboard to a software that was of more use, i decided on  Android and went for:

http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/android/cubiebox_tvbox_rel2.img  

That when my trouble started. Information on what types if images that are available is not good for new users. 

I tried to write using the  https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/ recommended in http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/12/09/cubieboard-unboxing-and-quick-start-guide/  or so I belived :-)

That was befor I understood that the images can be either a image suitable to direct write to a sd card with dd or win32-image-writer, how are i to see the difference? 

The tvbox image is in the http://linux-sunxi.org/LiveSuit_images format! How was I to know?

Well any way I guesses that might be the case after a number of hours of googling.

So I decided to use the livesuit program, after spending 3+ hours in trying to get livesuit to recognize the Cubieboard in FEL mode i gave up and found a reference to PhoenixCard.

I did not find out how to get correct drivers for the USB (android) device.

After finding PhoenixCardV306_2012_03_02 ( search in google to find download site ) I was able to create a sd-card that flashed the NAND.

I have not verified if PhoenixCard can create a runnable sdcard.

Now to my next problem :-)  How do I change or change storage usage on the tvbox image?

I was successfull in installing and running Netfix on the cubie board, a bit of lipsync problems on a movie, but that might be a movie coding problem.

But then I also wanted to install XBMC Android, the I got a out of memory message.

I guess the partition for application storage is full, this also causes the Browser to crash...

Any suggestions on what to do.

Best Regards

Bo-Erik Sandholm

Stockholm

[Henrik Nordström]

fre 2013-02-15 klockan 01:56 -0800 skrev bossesand:
>
>
> I wanted to upgrade my recently recived cubieboard to a software that
> was of more use, i decided on Android and went for:
>
>
> http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/android/cubiebox_tvbox_rel2.img

This image is an livesuit image and is flashed to the device using
livesuit or phoenixcard.

> Now to my next problem :-) How do I change or change storage usage on
> the tvbox image?

You probably need to rebuild the image with different partitioning
information and reflash using livesuit with the format flash checkbox
enabled (this option maybe also available with phoenixcard).
Unfortunately not an all trivial thing.

If the source is available and you don't mind rebuilding Android then
changing the partition layout is not too hard, simple update of a text
file and rebuild.

Another approach would be to unpack the image, unpack each filesystem,
modify partitioning definition in sys_config1.fex and use the allwinner
pack tools to repack the livesuit image.

Regards
Henrik

[Marcos Martinez]

Hi mate,

How can I unpack one of those images? And anybody has an image backup or know where to download the stock image that miniand use in his cubieboards?

Enviado desde mi iPhone

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[Bastiaan van den Berg]

There are also android tools like S2E that will allow you to change the partitions from within android, and will move the apps you install to the SD card slot.

Might work on cubie ;)

--

buZz