Dual-Boot ROMs?

[tusing]

Hello guys,

I would like to know if there is a way to dual-boot ROMs. It would be very convenient to navigate between Stock and other ROMs.

There was some talk over at XDA, but it was way over my head (the Optimus V is my first Android phone).

Anyone who knows would help me a LOT.

 

[JerryScript]

I don't think it's currently possible, but if the devs at xda are talking about it, it may be possible soon.

For now, the quickest way to change ROMs is restoring nandroid backups. Takes about 5 minutes, as opposed to 30-45 minutes for flashing then restoring app backups.

 

[asadullah]

It can be done they did it when I had my sprint hero. But its not really worth it if your constantly flashing new roms. Just my opinion not to deter you. Check out the sprint hero section on xda

 

[camf3xu]

I don't think it's currently possible, but if the devs at xda are talking about it, it may be possible soon.

For now, the quickest way to change ROMs is restoring nandroid backups. Takes about 5 minutes, as opposed to 30-45 minutes for flashing then restoring app backups.

30-45 min?? 5 to clear and flash, 1 to re dl titanium backup then a few to restore user Apps.

 

[JerryScript]

30-45 min?? 5 to clear and flash, 1 to re dl titanium backup then a few to restore user Apps.

I have 109 user apps, so it takes awhile

 

[bigsupersquid]

It can be done they did it when I had my sprint hero. But its not really worth it if your constantly flashing new roms. Just my opinion not to deter you. Check out the sprint hero section on xda

I found stuff in the hero section which implied the hero could boot from sd without mods to the system, which I couldn't see working on the OV.
of course, I didn't read everything, and only went through several pages of search, so I could well be incorrect.

asdullah, you seem to have a good handle on the inner workings of android, could you tell me how I'd go about adding a delay in init to allow init.rc to mount the sd card soon enough to boot from it?
I finally got a gingerbread repo to work from, it took many hours with the best connection speed I've ever gotten @ 500+Kb/sec..
what to do with init is my main block I've found so far which prevents me from further experimentation, and I'm really interested in boot-from-sd (could be considered a form of multi-boot if done right.)
thanks for your time!

 

[bigsupersquid]

Well, I remembered that way back when I first started looking into this I found a post on xda which said to add a pause (5); after the "ANDROID" text in init.
That does indeed work, allowing the sd partitions to be mounted in init.rc

I put up a brief howto on xda if anyone is interested.
here

 

[Kreatur3]

I'm interested but not that enough to take a chance of bricking me phone...it's beyond me lol.

 

[bigsupersquid]

I'm interested but not that enough to take a chance of bricking me phone...it's beyond me lol.

the brick warning is kind of a formality.
the sd-boot helps avoid bricking by allowing a safe reboot or battery pull that doesn't force you to go into recovery and flash back a working rom.
I did lose a bunch of my sdcard while attempting to boot franco's kernel, but that was it's own experiment and had nothing to do with dual-booting. it looks like the msm7227 drivers for the p500 are definitely not compatible with the msm7267 in the V, even though they're in the same family.