In the quest for the ideal XBMC set-top box, I’ve bought an ODROID-U2<\/a>. It’s a small devboard with an Exynos 4412 quad-core Cortex-A9 processor. Pretty much the same chipset as the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the Note 2, which should be more than enough to power XBMC I figured. (Note: At this point it doesn’t run XBMC flawless yet, the menus work great and much faster than on the RPi or the Pivos XIOS DS, 720p content seems to work fine, but 1080 still stutters a bit. However, that’ll supposedly get fixed once XBMC upgrades to multi-core ffmpeg or the video decoder will be implemented)<\/p>\n While the ODROID will boot from MicroSD perfectly, there’s another option called eMMC that is supposedly much faster. If you buy it from them, it’ll include a small converter to microSD so you can flash it with a computer. However, as it turns out this converter is absolute garbage<\/a>. it’s too big to fit into a regular uSD-SD converter, and even after I filed it down to the appropriate size, it still didn’t work.<\/p>\n So I had this nice box, with Android 4.0 pre-installed, but the one method to upgrade was broken.<\/p>\n Luckily, there’s another way to upgrade by booting to Ubuntu from a microSD card, and access the eMMC module on-board from there. I’ll detail how I did it here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You’ll need the following to complete this:<\/p>\n It’s always a good idea to have a backup, so we’ll make one. You can skip this step, but I believe it’s better to be safe than sorry. This will take a few minutes. I believe for my 8GB card it took about 15 minutes. If you want to have an estimate, first let it run for 30 seconds or so, and hit Ctrl+c, it should spit out how fast it’s copying. use that to calculate how long it’ll take, and run it again to finish it.<\/p>\n If you want to put that backup back for whatever reason, use the following commands:<\/p>\n Why? In the quest for the ideal XBMC set-top box, I’ve bought an ODROID-U2. It’s a small devboard with an Exynos 4412 quad-core Cortex-A9 processor. Pretty much the same chipset as the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the Note 2, which should be more than enough to power XBMC I figured. (Note: At this point it … Continue reading Flashing the ODROID-U2’s eMMC card without a reader<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-android"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fw.hardijzer.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What will you need?<\/h3>\n
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Step 1: Boot to Ubuntu<\/h3>\n
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Check everything<\/h3>\n
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\n\/dev\/mmcblk1p2 on \/ type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) [rootfs]
\nThis line means that Ubuntu runs from mmcblk1, \u00a0and the eMMC will probably be on mmcblk0. if that line reads \/dev\/mmcblk0… it’s the other way round.
\nIn this post I’ll assume the SD is at mmcblk1 and the eMMC is at mmcblk0. If it’s the other way around for you, remember to swap those around in any commands you type.<\/li>\n
\nNote that you can’t use anything on the eMMC itself, so nothing that starts with \/dev\/mmcblk0 should be used.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nUnmount everything<\/h3>\n
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Backups<\/h3>\n
\nIn my case, I needed about 600mb free to make a backup of my 8GB eMMC card. If you have more data on there, it could be much bigger. Seeing as I had some room on \/, I do this to generate a backup:<\/p>\n\n
\n<\/span><\/li>\n\n
Actual flashing<\/h3>\n
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\nfor example: unzip -p OdroidU2_eMMC_8G_image_04-Jan-2013.zip ODROID-U2.img | dd of=\/dev\/mmcblk0 bs=8M
\nNote that you don’t have to unzip the file first, you can unzip it directly to your eMMC.
\nThe ctrl+c trick mentioned in the backups to gauge the speed doesn’t work here. For me it did about 17.9 MB\/second, and the whole flash of 2.8GB took about 3 minutes.<\/span><\/li>\n