Boot images from external medias

There are many images running on SD card or U-Disk,for example, LibreELEC,Armbian images and Khadas SD images.This tutorial is about how to boot these images.

In order to boot images from exernal medias you must make sure:

• Android running on eMMC
• Activate the multi-boot

For different images you need different Android version.

• LibreELEC, Ubuntu with linux 3.14 you need Android M or latest Android N(V180207 or later) running on eMMC.
• Ubuntu with linux 4.9 need Android O running on eMMC.

1. Write image to SD card or U-Disk

• Use dd on 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 need to choose different dtb for VIM1 and VIM2.

• VIM1: Copy kvim.dtb or kvim_linux.dtb to /boot and rename it to dtb.img.
• VIM2: Copy kvim2.dtb or kvim2_linux.dtb to /boot and rename it to dtb.img.

3. Activate the multi-boot

Two ways to activate the multi-boot:
1). Via Keys mode
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 to external media image
  Note: Don’t use PC USB host to supply the power, or will fail to activate multi-boot!

NOTICE

• For previous Android N has permission issue, you can’t use it to boot your external media image, or your booting card will be broken.

• For Android O also has permission issue. If you want to boot Ubuntu with linux 4.9 please refer to this reply.