I naively installed the 2.6.31.14.2-efikasb-nodevtmpfs kernel and modules from the tarballs on http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms/efikamx/kernel. The smartbook doesn't boot (I remember a message about udev not being able to create a queue file; I can provide more detailed info if this failure is surprising.)

At one point, I had done the boot.scr stuff to enable booting from an external sd card; I seem to have lost that ability (perhaps because I deleted the file that the bootloader uses to enable that.)

Am I correct in thinking that:

- I'll be able to un-brick things if I can get into u-boot. (I was one of those whose smartbook shipped without a ribbon cable; I haven't checked to see if one has arrived in the last few weeks.)
- there's basically no other way to recover at this point

?

Ooops :)

The nodevtmpfs files were for people who had this awful, disgusting need to use Karmic (those people are Freescale by the way :)

Otherwise for Smartbook you should always use the devtmpfs kernels since they ship Maverick by default.

With the obvious out of the way, we can unbrick your system by trashing the whole thing. Do you have much data you are proud of on there? There will be an SD card image by the end of the week to at least update Smartbooks to the latest version (Maverick+GNOME and a U-Boot update) which does this.

What you COULD do is use this card (with a little tweak, you'll need to mount it and delete something from /etc/rc.local to stop it from installing) to rescue the data. You would need another Linux box with an SD card slot to get this done.

If we can go that route I can help you right now, if not, might have to wait a couple days.

In answer to your questions:
If you can make an SD card with the correct files on it (a boot.scr that instructs it to load a kernel from SD and finally boot from PATA) then this may be by far the quickest fix.

You'll just need a FAT formatted SD card to get that to work, and some finesse with another Linux box (creating a boot.scr is not that hard).
We can work something out for sure. Recovery options are basically get it running from SD card to either boot another Linux system to rescue what you have, or trash it completely, with an optional data backup inbetween..

What would you prefer?

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Matt Sealey

Thanks.

There's some stuff on the PATA that I'd like to keep, ideally.

I have an SD card with the "maverick final" filesystem and devtmpfs kernel+modules on it, but thought that the file created from boot.scr had to reside on one of the PATA partitions. If I can boot off of that, I can reinstall a working kernel on the PATA's boot partition and should be back in business.

I have a working T02 smarttop box if that'd make creating the magic file easier; I'm unclear as to where the magic file is supposed to reside.