Help installing OpenWRT image onto eMMC onboard storage

Products & Technology ODYSSEY Serials
#1

Proud new owner of the X86J4105 w/64GB eMMC. BIOS and EC have been updated, and I’ve built OpenWRT with Wireguard on a USB and love it! This will be a dedicated VPN router between my ISP and internal wireless network.

But my end game is to install the working OpenWRT config to the onboard eMMC (I don’t want or need the pre-installed (but unactivated) win10).

I don’t work much with eMMC storage and it “looks” a bit different…so figured I’d ask all y’all for a straight up walk through if anyone is willing to show me the way.

I’m looking for help both wiping out the existing eMMC install, then the install of the working image from the USB stick and having the unit boot from eMMC. I also want to expand the partition to take advantage of the entire storage media. Making it EFI compliant would be a bonus but I can live with compatibility mode.

Thanks in advance!

1 Like
#2

Hi，you need a winpe OS USB disk to boot on, then use Roadkil’s Disk Image to write the image to eMMC.

#3

I’m confused about your response. I do not want any Microsoft Windows install - I want to remove the existing install from the eMMC. Both the winpe usb stick and roadkil’s disk image look to be Microsoft Windows centric.

I suspect I need to use fdisk to remove the existing emmc partitions, then write the current openwrt image to eemc using the “dd” command, then extending the last partition using yet another linux package liek “resize2fs”.

Looking for someone with more experience to confirm and maybe provide the steps.

My fdisk -l returns the following

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 58.25 GiB, 62537072640 bytes, 122142720 sectors

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disklabel type: gpt

Disk identifier: 9878681B-C532-4C8A-8736-8B096E77BCA1

Device Start End Sectors Size Type

/dev/mmcblk0p1 2048 206847 204800 100M EFI System

/dev/mmcblk0p2 206848 239615 32768 16M Microsoft reserved

/dev/mmcblk0p3 239616 120502271 120262656 57.4G Microsoft basic data

/dev/mmcblk0p4 120502272 122140671 1638400 800M Windows recovery environment

Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot1: 4 MiB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot0: 4 MiB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk /dev/sda: 14.93 GiB, 16008609792 bytes, 31266816 sectors

Disk model: Cruzer Glide

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disklabel type: dos

Disk identifier: 0xeb3ae1bb

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type

/dev/sda1 * 512 33279 32768 16M 83 Linux

/dev/sda2 33792 558079 524288 256M 83 Linux

#4

You cant’ boot linux from eMMC. I spent hours on that one.
Just get a M.2 SSD, and you will have that working in no time.

#5

We have fix this bug, Pls update your BIOS and EC.

#6

Thanks - I was debating on picking up an internal SSD but was being pig headed trying to make the eMMC work

#7

Bruce.Qin - I have updated both the BIOS and EC to the 4/16/2021 released versions.

Using an EFI version of OpenWRT 19.07.5 image, I first tested from a USB thumb drive and the USB was seen as a EFI device and booted without issue.

I next tried the same image on the eMMC storage. I used a bootable UBS version of FINNIX and completed the following steps

wget https://github.com/oofnikj/openwrt-efi-tools/releases/download/v19.07.5/openwrt-19.07.5-x86-64-combined-ext4-efi-resized.img.gz

gzip -d openwrt-19.07.5-x86-64-combined-ext4-efi-resized.img.gz

dd if=openwrt-19.07.5-x86-64-combined-ext4-efi-resized.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

There were no errors during this process. After reboot, the eMMC was not recognized as an EFI boot option in the BIOS setup.

So I am still unable to install and boot from the eMMC storage on the ODYSSEY X86J4104864 onboard storage.

#8

And I’ve checked…emmc is enabled in the BIOS

#9

@RTJ Try this firmware, we tested the official openwrt firmware before and also could not boot from emmc.
http://firmware.koolshare.cn/LEDE_X64_fw867/openwrt-koolshare-router-v2.37-r17471-8ed31dafdf-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined-efi.img.gz