MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - External Booting for Kobos (aka boot from external SD card)

pazos · 08-01-2017, 04:27 PM

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.

08-01-2017, 04:27 PM	#1
pazos cosiñeiro Posts: 1,406 Karma: 2451781 Join Date: Apr 2014 Device: BQ Cervantes 4	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.