New Image for TouchBook

Is it possible to make a Raspberry Pi-style overlapping image for the TouchBook?

I’ve tried using the RPi image and then adding the relevant mlo and u-boot.bin files from a working Touchbook SD card, but I get the “Blank Screen Of Bad SD” issue.

I can’t think of a way round it – I suspect that SDCreate would rewipe the whole image and delete the SDFS partition and put me back to square one.

Does SDCreate write just to the FAT partition (or can it be made to do so)?

I’ve tried using the RPi image and then adding the relevant mlo and u-boot.bin files from a working Touchbook SD card, but I get the “Blank Screen Of Bad SD” issue.

You didn’t say what riscos image file you used, I think you need the OMAP3 riscos image file – the Pi is a different SoC variant.

You didn’t say what riscos image file you used, I think you need the OMAP3 riscos image file – the Pi is a different SoC variant.

I used the OMAP3 rom.

I’ve had a play and tried SDCreate to make a TouchBook SD image in the FAT partition, but I still get the blank screen. So it appears that’s not working so well. I don’t know if SDCreate has overwritten the SDFS partition though, and I can only see a 31MB FAT partition.

Any ideas anyone?

off topic-question:
where can i get a touchbook?
fear its not availlable anymore?

off topic-question:
where can i get a touchbook?
fear its not availlable anymore?

The question is, I think, does anybody know if a touchbook is happy with its’ FAT32 partition containing the uboot, mlo and RISC OS at the end of the disk?

!SDCreate won’t work for this sort of thing as it always creates a small FAT32 partition at the start of the disk.

One thing I remember from my OMAP3 days is that you had to be careful in which order the various files were copied accross into the FAT32 partition – maybe that is it?

One solution I used was to reformat the FAT partition under Windows (using the ‘Quick’ option) and copy the files back in. This seems not to upset a split-partition SD card. I think the split-partition SD card actually has the FAT partition before the filecore partition, carefully surrounded by metadata (in the area normally occupied by the partition table) so that the filecore partition does not write in the FAT partition except when writing to the DOS image file in !Boot.Loader.

Keith:

One thing I remember from my OMAP3 days is that you had to be careful in which order the various files were copied accross into the FAT32 partition – maybe that is it?

and Chris:

One solution I used was to reformat the FAT partition under Windows (using the ‘Quick’ option) and copy the files back in.

I think a combination of these might be the answer:
I remade the uImage file using !mkfile.
I’ve formatted the partition in Windows using Quick Format and then written the files back to the card in this order:
mlo
uboot.bin
uImage
CMOS

and it boots up! The new ROM is much advanced over the last one I used. Pretty battery charging icons for a start.

Opening a task window, I loaded SDFS (*SDFS) successfully and tried to *CAT the drive, but got a drive error saying the disk drive was empty. Not sure if my earlier attempt with SDCreate didn’t wipe the SDFS partition from the RPi image.

Will have another go from scratch tomorrow, when I don’t have Doctor Who to watch…

Erich:

off topic-question:
where can i get a touchbook?
fear its not availlable anymore?

I may be prepared to sell mine, once I’ve got it working properly with RISC OS. It has the battery charging issue (mentioned here ) and has a slight issue with one of the hinges on the keyboard, due to the poor build quality (the plastic around the hinge opens up slightly when using opening the screen up).

Apart from that, it’s fine and works well. It’s a later 512mb version.

andym:
i’m interested, and i can wait… :-)

when I don’t have Doctor Who to watch…

Gah! Missed it. Thank goodness for BBC THREE’s repeats (Friday eve).

Gah! Missed it.

Restore is OK to a point. You need regular backups though, or you really do wind back the clock.
If you figure that out without watching every second you probably have second sight.

Right, watched Doctor Who and tried again.

No better… I’ve got it to boot, but it can’t remember any CMOS settings and I still get a “disk drive is empty” when trying to access an SDFS drive. There is no SDFS icon present either. Does anyone know if RISC OS can actually access the SD Card after it has finished booting from it, or is it not possible?

Oh pants! Just spotted the comment from Ben at the bottom of this page…