need advice to debug boot failure in custom rom

[Albert Ma]

Hi all,

I rolled my own ROM. Basically Harmonia 1.6.1c - mvdalvik + data2ext

The second sdcard partition is ext4
I formatted all mtd partitions

It seemed to install correctly.

However, it never made it past the LG boot logo.
I did a compare of the zip on the sdcard and the zip on my desktop, and there was no corruption.

Does anybody have any advice on debugging this?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Albert Ma]

I neglected to resign the files. Would that be the cause of the hang? What exactly does signing do? Do these signatures end up somewhere?

 

[bigsupersquid]

did you try to see if adb will connect while it's hung?
in my experience, if

adb shell

fails with a "/system/bin/sh not found" error, then the boot.img worked but /system was not installed correctly or mismounted in init.rc or something, and it's not present during the bad boot.
if adb tells you no device present, probably even the boot.img didn't run.

 

[Albert Ma]

adb shows no device. I even added
start adbd
as the first command in on boot in the init.rc, but it's not clear to me if it even got there.

at what point in the boot process does the LG logo show up?


some random questions
1. in init.rc, when does the "on nand" and "on init" sections get run?
2. where are the kernel modules? I expected to find them in the (Harmonia) ramdisk image.

 

[LeslieAnn]

LG logo is the firmware in the phone has loaded.
The first Harmonia logo (Picasticks/Aphrodite) means the kernel and boot.omg has loaded.
The second Harmonia logo means framework-res.apk has loaded.
The launcher loads after that.

Your phone isn't getting to or beyond the kernel, so either you damaged something or it didn't install properly.

 

[Albert Ma]

thanks for the reply!
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm using the picasticks kernel unmodified. I copied the kernel command line from stock (also same as Harmonia iirc). were there any other arguments to mkbootimg you used?
is there any way to get the kernel dmesg out?

 

[Albert Ma]

it turns out the scripts I was using wasn't preserving the --base and --pagesize arguments for mkbootimg. I found some better tools.

now it boots, but the filesystem layout isn't quite right. /data/dalvik-cache is missing so nothing java runs. should be easy to debug though since now adb works.

thanks!