minix neo x5 mini – backup partitions and investigate

Urgh, I hate the massive pile of rom noise around anything to do with android devices.

I’m using https://github.com/neo-technologies/rkflashtool because it appears to be actually maintained. https://github.com/linuxerwang/rkflashkit is also somewhat convenient, though it’s gui only. If it was a nice python tool with a gui front end that would be even better. (no idea why you need waf and install either, simple “python run.py” is perfectly suitable.) libusb+python is perfectly acceptable for this sort of thing. No idea why people went straight to C code. https://github.com/neo-technologies/rockchip-mkbootimg looks good too, but I’ve not poked it yet. Anything that’s being maintained basically.

A commonly referred tool, https://github.com/naobsd/rkutils while often pointed to, is effectively a dead end with zero follow up commits. I’ve no interest in following that nest of forks.

Anyway, here’s the bits that actually worked to open up the boot partition image extracted with either rkflashkit or rkflashtools…

  • ./rkflashtool r boot > boot.img
  • dd if=boot.img of=bootimg.gz skip=8 bs=1 count=20000000
  • mkdir hohoho && cd hohoho
  • gunzip < ../bootimg.gz | cpio -i --make-directories

According to this review of boot.img formats, this means the x5mini uses format 4.

karlp@teros:~/projects/rkflashtool/hoho (master)$ ls
charger       init.goldfish.rc       init.usb.rc               sbin                 ueventd.rk30board.rc
data          init.rc                proc                      sys
default.prop  init.rk30board.rc      res                       system
dev           init.rk30board.usb.rc  rk30xxnand_ko.ko.3.0.36+  ueventd.goldfish.rc
init          init.trace.rc          rk30xxnand_ko.ko.3.0.8+   ueventd.rc
karlp@teros:~/projects/rkflashtool/hoho (master)$ 

Still learning the pieces, this is as much diary as blog.

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