There are many images that are designed to run from an SD Card or Thumbdrive (U-Disk). For example, CoreELEC, LibreELEC, Armbian images and Khadas SD images. This tutorial is about how to boot these images.
In order to boot images from external media you must make sure:
- Android is running on the eMMC
- Activate the Multi-Boot
For different images you may need different Android versions.
- LibreELEC / Ubuntu with Linux 3.14: You need Android M or the latest Android N (V180207 or later) running on the eMMC.
- Ubuntu with Linux 4.9: You need Android O running on the eMMC.
1. Write image to SD-Card or Thumbdrive (U-Disk)
Use
dd
on the Ubuntu command line$ sudo dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/sdX bs=8M
Use
Win32DiskImager
on Windows. Please refer to Install LibreELEC Via Windows PC.
2. Prepare DTB
You will have to choose different DTB for VIM1 and VIM2.
- VIM1: Copy
kvim.dtb
,kvim_linux.dtb
ormeson-gxl-s905x-khadas-vim.dtb
to/boot
and rename it todtb.img
. - VIM2: Copy
kvim2.dtb
,kvim2_linux.dtb
ormeson-gxm-khadas-vim2.dtb
to/boot
and rename it todtb.img
.
3. Activate The Multi-Boot
2 ways to activate Multi-Boot:
1). Via Keys mode (Side-Buttons).
2). Activate Multi-Boot via Android.
- Enter
Settings>About Device->System->Updates
. - Click select and choose
aml_autosript.zip
. - Click update, then the system will reboot and boot from the external media image.
Note: Don’t use your PC as the USB-Host to supply the electrical power, lest it will fail to activate Multi-Boot!
NOTICE
Android N has a permission issue. You cannot use it to boot from your external media image without damaging your SD card.
Android O also has a permission issue. If you want to boot Ubuntu with Linux 4.9 please refer to this guide.