Help needed - New to Android OS, basic questions

prohopole

New member
Hello all,

I'm trying to install Android on a WM8505 Netbook, and have run into a tiny snag.

Basically, all the installers for this device assume that the book has all of it's internal storage in NAND via /dev/mtd9, etc.

The hardware version I have, however, has the memory segments assigned to /dev/sda/. What's worse, it would appear that /sda/ has a hardcoded partition table that keeps it split into three partitions, /sda1, /sda2, and /sda3. Either that, or I'm a linux noob and have no idea what I'm doing with fdisk.

I say this, because when I try to use fdisk d, fdisk n to create four properly sized partitions for use with Android, it fails in writing the partition table with an error "old partition table still in use". Rebooting confirms this as /sda1 /sda2 /sda3 are back again.


So, here are my questions.

1. Am I correct in thinking that the memory is some kind of freak USB/NAND hybrid...where the device treats it as USB but it's partition info is hardwired into it? Or is there a possiblity that I'm just stupid and don't have the right permissions or something to overwrite a part table?

2. If I'm not stupid, then do I HAVE to have four partitions for Android to work correctly? Can I modify the installer and force it to share a partition for system and userspace or something? Because that looks like my only option.

3. If yes for 2, then the init.rc...help! I can understand changing /dev/mtd stuff, but what about the lines like so:

"#mount yaffs2 mtd@system /system"

How do I modify this stuff to reflect the changes I made?


Please forgive my ignorance...I'm new to linux environments, but not computers.
 
Lets go back to basics here. What brand/model of via 8505 soc (system on a chip) do you have?

I have installed 3 different variations of the "demo" Android on a Sylvania Netbook. Most of the specifications I have looked at for this 7" mini/smart/netbook indicate that you have SDRAM and you have flash ram.

All the installs I have used completely wipe out everything on the flash ram/nand and re-format it to however it prefers. So if you have a standard 7" Chinese netbook its probable that you are barking up the wrong tree...

Sorry I can't address your specifics about Android/Linux but then I probably know less about that/those OS"s than you do.

Tom M
 
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