Writing to Pi Partition

Hi

Is there an obvious way that I can get RISC OS on the Pi to write to the primary FAT32 partition that the Pi boots from?

No immediate Google answers and I’m way too early into the source to appreciate technicalities. The ideal way – which I suspect isn’t going to be possible – is that I build RISC OS on the Pi, and take the image from the Images folder to overwrite the RISCOS.IMG file in the main partition so that a reboot of RISC OS will allow for an immediate test of the new OS. (Otherwise I’m currently left faffing with swapping SD cards around).

Bit of a long shot I appreciate, but I suspect a post here might gain much more efficient answers than me trawling through source code at this stage. Any responses appreciated.

Depends what you want to do. The PC partition is available as the image file $.!Boot.Loader, you can open, create, read files in there just like normal.

Ah, just read the end of your message. ;-)

Go into Loader and rename the current “RISCOS/IMG” file to something like “RISCOS/OLD” (so you can put the SD card info a PC or phone to revert if necessary) and then drop the new build in as “RISCOS/IMG” and it’ll load when the machine is rebooted.

Look also at the end of the “CONFIG/SYS” file, there should be a line like:

kernel=riscos.img

It might be useful to alter that if you wish to swap different versions (say stable and latest) frequently…

Perfect, thanks Rick. That may well be what I’m looking for, I can see it under $.!Boot.Loader as you say. I’ll give that a whirl and see how that works out.

BTW, something to point out clearly:

RISC OS does not (currently) support partitions. The FAT boot partition actually exists within a FileCore partition using applied magic.

Consequently, that big Loader file/directory must never be deleted, and never be copied. It isn’t a representation of the boot partition, it is the boot partition. Access files within, but leave it itself alone…

To confirm, thanks Rick you’re absolutely bang on. Just proved that I’m able to build RISC OS on the Pi here and deploy it to the inbuilt SD card so I can reboot into the new kernel/OS immediately. So very glad people like you are around!