# HP Touchpad Boot Process



## hk135 (Aug 25, 2011)

Hi Guys

Im interested in getting other, probably nix based, operating systems to run on my newly bought tablet. My main concern is that if I go whole hog and wipe the internal memory (mmc0 i believe) so that i can try and get something like ubuntu runninm, can I still get to the bootie boot loader to mess with the boot setting, and can i still use webos doctor to reset should it all go wrong?

I think the main info that would be useful is does anybody know the boot process followed on the touchpad.

Thanks


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## ECOTOX (Jun 24, 2011)

Well, I can tell u it uses uboot, I'll let u know more when I get mine

Sent from my SGH-T959 using Tapatalk


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## Taylored (Aug 22, 2011)

You might do better to do a Ubuntu dual boot. http://forums.precentral.net/webos-development/292457-tutorial-how-get-ubuntu-touchpad.html

That is my weekend project.


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## hk135 (Aug 25, 2011)

Yeah, I got that running already, I was more hoping to run natively.

Thinking about it my main concern is how much can I do to the pad before webos doctor wont work!


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## Taylored (Aug 22, 2011)

ah, yes... that would be nice to know 
Looks like you are way ahead of me.

Did you get Chromium running?


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## Smith7018 (Aug 25, 2011)

Taylored said:


> You might do better to do a Ubuntu dual boot. http://forums.precentral.net/webos-development/292457-tutorial-how-get-ubuntu-touchpad.html
> 
> That is my weekend project.


Running natively doesn't mean you can dual boot, there's a HUGE difference.


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## Taylored (Aug 22, 2011)

yeah. I was going to edit that, but I thought no one noticed.


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## hk135 (Aug 25, 2011)

@Taylored

I didn't try to get Chromium running tbh, firefox and nagios plugin works gret tho!


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## hk135 (Aug 25, 2011)

Okay, from what I have found...

If you wipe the memory your pretty much screwed (I havn't btw). I havnt opened the pad yet to see if there is any easy way to get at the memory, but I expect not.
The memory is laid out into 14 partitions and generally dont touch partitions 1-12, partition 13 is where bootie lives so dont kill it, im gonna have a go at modding it but this partition is required to enable restore mode.
Partiton 14 is an LVM volume with everything else on there.


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## scifan (Aug 22, 2011)

Have you guys looked here: http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Last_Resort_Emergency_BootLoader_Recovery


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## Rakeesh (Aug 22, 2011)

scifan said:


> Have you guys looked here: http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Last_Resort_Emergency_BootLoader_Recovery


That won't work on a touchpad, it uses a different SoC.


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## calris (Aug 22, 2011)

ECOTOX said:


> Well, I can tell u it uses uboot, I'll let u know more when I get mine


How sure are you? From everything I have seen, the bootloader is called 'bootie' which looks like U-Boot. Now maybe it is a derivative, in which case we can ask HP for the source (U-Boot is GPL)

Can anyone confirm that the bootloader is indeed U-Boot? If it is, I'll be putting in a request to HP for the source code

I have a TouchPad but I'm not allowed to unbox it until Sunday


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## ECOTOX (Jun 24, 2011)

They have uboot source/patches on the palm/HP open source website =)

I think that they use a multi stage bootloading process

Sent from my SGH-T959 using Tapatalk


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## calris (Aug 22, 2011)

The U-Boot patches on the Palm open source site are rubbish (a trivial patch to a makefile) - I have put in a request to HP asking if the boot loader is a U-Boot (or is any other GPL code) derivative and if so, to provide the source code

I'll let you know what I get back


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## calris (Aug 22, 2011)

ECOTOX said:


> Well, I can tell u it uses uboot, I'll let u know more when I get mine


Reply from HP/Palm:



> Thank you for your interest in the Touchpad. The bootloader in webOS is proprietary, and as such is not released as source.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Palm Open Source Team.


So it *does not* run U-Boot.


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