Can someone post instructions on how to boot from eMMC

[ftravers]

Could someone post or point to instructions on how to install to eMMC for the Samsung Chromebook?

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7 ... s-ui-tabs2

Is great for SD/USB, but it doesn't have explicit instructions on how to flash the bios and boot directly from eMMC.

The Ctrl-U then boot from USB/SD card is painfully slow.

Thank you so much for your help!

[WarheadsSE]

I was fairly certain I had said this before:
- Install to USB/SD
- Boot
- Install to eMMC

For what should be obvious reasons, you can't install over top of the running operating system.

[ftravers]

trying to go about this process slowly so i dont brick the laptop.

strata talked about first testing the process by

1 - install to USB
2 - make a bootable SD card from the USB
3 - flash the bios with nv_image-snow.bin
4 - doing some steps to boot from the SD card

once this is established to be working repeat steps for eMMC.

my question is, after I do step 3, flashing the bios, can i revert that step? I know I can backup the bios, but what I'm concerned about is after I flash the bios, can I still boot into the USB to restore the original bios if i want?

[ftravers]

I tried flashing the bios, but got some error messages. First I read and wrote the original image, but did notice a message saying: "Block protection could not be disabled!"

I did the process of removing the conducting metal ring/sticker, but didn't check conductivity as I didn't have a continuity checker handy. Is the above message a symptom of that?

When I tried to write the new BIOS image with:

# flashrom.google -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev1.0 -w nv_image-snow.bin

i'd get error messages like:

Block protection could not be disabled!
Erasing and writing flash chip contents... ERASE FAILED at 0x0000....

I've got a continuity checker now so I'll crack the laptop open again and see if that was the problem and report back.

[WarheadsSE]

Goddamit. YOU DO NOT NEED TO FLASH THE BIOS

STOP DOING THIS IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS WHAT SO EVER.

[ftravers]

So I can have Arch installed to the eMMC and not have to press Ctrl-U, and not have any dangling SD cards / USB drives, and have a boot time to Arch approx 10s, without flashing BIOS? If so whats the point of flashing BIOS?

[WarheadsSE]

You need to ctrl-d or ctrl-u without wiping the bios entirely, yes. But obviously, since everyone keeps telling you that you can install to the eMMC, then yes you can install to the eMMC.

If you want to remove all trace of ChromeOS, then you will need to replace the bios. Doing that does completely invalidate any warranty, and will make it harder to reset in the even you brick the piss out of it (which is kinda hard). To do that, there are a few things that have to be done, and I am not going to tell you what they are because they are freely available online.

Either way, you have to install to a system running on USB/SD, then to the eMMC.