Chromebook USB boot - does not work with > 16GB drive?

[jus10]

There is actually a patch for the firmware spring branch of uboot which introduces an increasing delay of up to 10 seconds. Someone mentioned it on IRC It is here: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/c/65542/ I just rebuilt the nv_uboot_spring (which won't work for you) with said image. However, that doesn't help when you're trying nv_uboot from the slow device (and spring wouldn't help your snow anyway).

I would think the easy path would be to put in a SD card with the nv-boot image and have it boot, load the kernel from partition 2 of the SD card and then set the root filesystem to the /dev/sd(whatever the usb card is). You can set the $dev_extras variable to append a root=/dev/whatever to your boot process.

[raumzeit]

thanks for the hint to the spring patch. I wonder if this will find it's way into uboot-snow as well at some point.
Anyway, since I don't really like the idea of having an sd card sticking out of my chromebook all the time I thought of two other solutions. First, I could get rid of chromeos and install arch-linux root directory onto the internal ssd and just have the /home directory being located on the usb stick. The other solution, which for the time being I would prefer if possible, is to flash the second uboot to nv-uboot-snow, and let it just boot off the usb stick instead of the internal ssd. However, I did not dig into that as much as to know if that (a) is possible without destroying chromeos, and (b) taking away the possibility to recover the chromebook to its factory defaults.

Can someone tell me if I would be able to recover the device completely, just in case, after messing around with the second-stage uboot?

Thanks!

[jus10]

There are additional steps needed to boot a verified uboot kernel from a nv_uboot according to the information on the ChromiumOS site. There are several other options and I don't think I'd personally jump to the modifying hardware aspect right off the bat. Installing to the eMMC without flashing the rom is completely reversible.

[heywire]

Interestingly enough, I found this thread while searching for the same problem with my Samsung Chromebook and a 16GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit. I have an SD card which works fine, but trying to boot from this USB stick gives me the loud beep. Consider yourself lucky that your 16GB drive works!