SD card creation made easy

After battling long and hard with the FrontEnd module over the past few nights, I now have a much more user-friendly version of my SDCreate program ready for testing.

http://www.phlamethrower.co.uk/riscos/sdcreate.zip

This version should allow SD card images to be created for all OMAP3 machines which RISC OS currently runs on (and the Pandora, for good measure). BeagleBoard-xM users will need to track down suitable copies of x-loader and U-Boot, TouchBook users will need x-loader, U-Boot and mkimage, while everyone else can be content in the knowledge that everything they need is in the above archive.

Apart from writing images straight to SD cards, this new version also allows the image to be saved as a file on disc, as well as allowing saved images (of pretty much any type) to be written out to cards.

As long as nobody complains about how horribly broken it all is, in the next day or two I’m planning on adding this program to CVS as a replacement for the boot scripts and text file which are currently distributed with OMAP ROMs.

Also if anyone can come up with a better icon that I can use then they’ll get a free prize :)

(NB: The prize isn’t very exciting)

This is a great addition, Jeffrey! And a front end, too! Impressive ;-) Thanks for all your hard work. Haven’t had a chance to actually make an image or card yet, but I’ll give it a spin soon!

I just tried it on my Iyonix. It appears to work fine. I get a card that is readable on both RISC OS and XP.

I notice that it only takes up the first 8MB of the card, is that for the future to allow an ADFS boot partition?

I guess I should start saving for a touchbook or a pandora now.

P.S. The icon has a certain retro charm about it.

I notice that it only takes up the first 8MB of the card, is that for the future to allow an ADFS boot partition?

Kinda. The real reason is that I didn’t want to mess around trying to write my own FAT formatter, so the tool just contains a copy of a blank 8MB FAT partition that it uses as a template. Plus using a small, fixed-size partition also makes it easier to distribute SD images.

It took slightly more than “a day or two”, but I’ve now updated the ROM packaging process to include !SDCreate in the OMAP3 ROM archives instead of just a bunch of U-Boot scripts. I’ve also rewritten the much-neglected Using the Cortex-A8 port wiki page to describe how to use SDCreate instead of doing everything manually. There are also instructions there for setting up the hard disc 4 image using nothing more than the OMAP itself, although I haven’t tried the exact instructions listed so there might be a couple of steps missing ;) (Probably just dismissing error prompts due to !Boot being missing/suddenly appearing)

And of course there’s the winner of the !SDCreate icon competition – out of a grand total of three entries, Chris Wraight’s entry stood out above the rest, so he gets his icon immortalized in ROOL’s CVS repository, and of course on my website

Phew, sounds like even I’ll be able to get things going. Great job!

Nice one, Jeffrey :-) That’s just great! My -xM’s up and running now. I’ve added some further notes to the wiki page to simplify the extraction process for those without an existing RISC OS device with USB support. It’s a bit of a hack but I’m not a programmer. If anyone can suggest how to do things more elegantly, please amend or give me some pointers and I’ll update when I find time. (E.g. Shouldn’t assume the device is writable and also should dismount in case it’s the device to be formatted.)

• Now that SD card images are so easily created (and saved), will they be directly available for those needing to write the ROM to SD card without RISCOS (while avoiding the manual procedure )?
• Is it possible to open a directory viewer from the CLI without automatically filer_booting (like pressing Ctrl)? I’m using *Filer_OpenDir (This is to open the extracted HardDisc4 directory for manual copying without prompting the ‘Boot has not been run’ message or whatever it says.)

Edit: Updated script on the wiki page . Should there be any warnings about possibly encountering an “Ambiguous disc name” message or similar?

I am a bit confused, does the tool access the SDcard in the SDcard slot of the beagleboard? There seems to be much silence about adding SDcard support to the beagleboard.

EDIT: after reading the !Help of !SDcreate it became clear to me that SDcard access is done through a USB card reader.

...updated the ROM packaging process to include !SDCreate in the OMAP3 ROM archives instead of just a bunch of U-Boot scripts.

Now included in the latest Beagle ROM build zipfile

Phew, sounds like even I’ll be able to get things going. Great job!

Success, Patric? Or are you still awaiting delivery of your board?

On which page(s)?

Sorry for the ambiguity. I’m only referring to the InstallHD4 script…

¹ Except in the case of those using a portable custom boot sequence for use with different machines.

Anyway, I presume the script will be redundant once the SD/MMC driver’s working and the boot sequence can be used from the SD card. Could this be incorporated in a further-revised SDCreate at some point?

Yes, the basic plan is for a new version of SDCreate to be produced which will allow people to install the boot sequence to the SD card as well.

Except in the case of those using a portable custom boot sequence for use with different machines.

Or for people who can’t run SDCreate due to not having an existing RISC OS machine!

Anyway, I presume the script will be redundant once the SD/MMC driver’s working and the boot sequence can be used from the SD card

At the moment we are lucky if we can fetch and write ‘CMOS RAM’ on the SD card.

AFAIK, to make the Boot sequence accessible on the SD Card we would need RISCOS to accept multiple partitions on the SD as it has to be FAT for loading RISCOS and NOT FAT for loading the !Boot sequence.

AFAIK, to make the Boot sequence accessible on the SD Card we would need RISCOS to accept multiple partitions on the SD as it has to be FAT for loading RISCOS and NOT FAT for loading the !Boot sequence.

Correct.

Anyway, I presume the script will be redundant once the SD/MMC driver’s working and the boot sequence can be used from the SD card

At the moment we are lucky if we can fetch and write ‘CMOS RAM’ on the SD card… accept multiple partitions…

“Anyway, I presume the script will be redundant once the SD/MMC driver’s working (including multiple partions and non-FAT support) and the boot sequence can be used from the SD card.”

No Problem – but this is maybe the right moment to start a thread about partitioning in RISCOS. I could not find any thread I could revive – so if nobody objects I’ll start one…

No objections from me…

Phew, sounds like even I’ll be able to get things going. Great job!

Success, Patric? Or are you still awaiting delivery of your board?

Nah, received my board last week but without a monitor and only very limited computing power (like I know how to make any sense of minicom) that’ll have to wait just a little longer. Once I’m home though it’ll be dead easy using VRPC on my SD reader equipped Tosh.

BTW for some peculiar reason a lot of RISC OS websites, including this one, seem to be off limits here. Tried the public network as well as the council network in the library but no cigar. Somebody in Hull bearing a serious grudge against Acorn, no doubt!

Totally off-topic post follows – purists, avert your eyes.

In Merton, the public library network blocks http://b3ta.com/ but not http://www.b3ta.com/ . Their excuse? “Pornography.”

Eh?

Or for people who can’t run SDCreate due to not having an existing RISC OS machine!

If that’s the issue, I don’t see how a Command file would be any kind of improvement…

The script just makes it slightly quicker and easier for people to extract their boot sequence onto a natively formatted device. It has nothing to do with creation of the SD card image itself.

For those who extract the boot sequence as part of the SD card creation process under RISC OS (in the longer term, with a future version of SDCreate, when multiple partions and non-FAT support is implemented), there’ll be no need for the script. But I think the point made was that its use could remain beneficial (for the purpose it was devised, i.e. easier boot sequence extraction) for those who can’t use SDCreate under RISC OS.

...purists, avert your eyes… blocks http…

And this corporate network allows both http://openpandora.ca/ and http://openpandora.org/ but not http://open-pandora.org/ “This Websense category is filtered: Games.”

Somehow not working. The Angstrom distribution runs fine on my BB XM RevB but can’t get the SD image to work. Since I couldn’t access the original card on my windows machine (not formated) I copied mlo and u-boot from here: http://beagleboard-validation.s3.amazonaws.com/deploy/201008201549/sd/MLO

Ran SD create on VRPC and told it to create but not write the image. AIUI the image is written to the blank file in the sd create dir. Copied that, renamed it to blank.img and wrote it to the card using Win32DiskImager.exe. Windows now claims that the card isn’t formated and contains 0 Kb. When inserting it into the BB nothing happens.

I also tried renaming blank.img to boot.img, formating the card to either FAT or Fat32 (using windows) but so far had no success.