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#1 |
cosiñeiro
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Karma: 2200073
Join Date: Apr 2014
Device: BQ Cervantes 4
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External Booting for Kobos (aka boot from external SD card)
Hi. Something that I find useful and can't find here in mobilereads:
This works for Kobo models: Tested (Touch, Aura HD) Non tested (Glo, Aura, Aura H2O) Non working (lack of SD mainly): Mini, Glo HD, Aura One ... The bootloader has a recovery mode that is triggered with button combination --- WITH the device turned off -- : For Kobo Touch: home + power For other models: frontlight + power Using those key combos the device will boot with the first partition of the external SD card as the rootfs. The filesystem must be ext2/3/4 for this partition. You can boot debian or any other armhf distro with this method! Have fun... Issues: - if you run the stock OS with the external SD plugged in it will display a warning message about invalid format and sometimes will atempt to format the partition as vfat. So you MUST power off your device and extract the external SD card before running the stock OS. - the recovery script that uboot runs seems to take more time than normal boot. Very noticeable (2-3seconds). This means that external booting takes more time than internal booting. |
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#2 |
Enthusiast
![]() Posts: 42
Karma: 50
Join Date: Oct 2011
Device: Sony:psr 650 , KOBO:aura h2O, KOBO:Aura One
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Thanks for this usefull tip, but could you please elaborate how to do that for an (old)H2o, there's only a power button there, so how to trigger a button combination?
Power button + ????? |
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#3 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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Karma: 47303822
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Sydney, Australia
Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos
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Quote:
Disclaimer: The above is an educated guess. It might just factory reset your device. Take a copy of the data on the shared partition before trying. |
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#4 |
Wizard
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Karma: 2914715
Join Date: Jun 2012
Device: kobo touch
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#5 |
Groupie
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Karma: 38050
Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: Anywhere I am sent!!!
Device: Kobo Touch
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could you provide links to the distros etc :-)
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#6 | |
cosiñeiro
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Posts: 1,316
Karma: 2200073
Join Date: Apr 2014
Device: BQ Cervantes 4
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Quote:
sorry but no ready-to-go binary distros for armhf. slackwarearm should work but is soft-float so you'll loss the ability to run other software made for kobo. Here is a link to the mini-rootfs ftp://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwar...01Jul16.tar.xz I would suggest to install debian instead. You can install it via debootstrap/multistrap, there are a lot of guides online for that task. I think I can legally share a binary copy of debian armhf distro targeted for kobos, but sadly I can't distribute the kernel, kernel modules and fw present on kobo devices, which are needed to do something useful with the device. |
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#7 |
Junior Member
![]() Posts: 2
Karma: 10
Join Date: Feb 2019
Device: Kobo Touch N905
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Has anyone confirmed it works on Kobo Touch N905, the one without internal SD card? It seems like a perfect way to get Linux without risking bricking the device, as it doesn't touch the internal memory. All I've managed to do is factory reset mine a few times. I've tried:
-formatting a card as ext4 and using dd with Marek's Debian image from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=222123 -formatting a card as ext3 and using dd with https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=203986 -unpacking the slackware pazos provided one year ago. I've just unpacked it on ext3 formatted SD card If nobody can confirm/deny it works on N905 mk3, I'd be grateful for instructions on how to create a working SD card for one of the other devices, so I can adapt it to mine. |
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Aura H2O Boot from external SD | basttran | Kobo Developer's Corner | 17 | 04-07-2019 06:10 AM |
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