Samsung ARM Chromebook 1.0.6 image not booting

[wetfeet2000]

I have been using a 16GB SSD card to boot kali linux 1.0.5 for the last few months on my Samsung Series 3 ARM chromebook. I recently downloaded the 1.0.6 image in hopes of having better hardware support with the new kernel. However, Offensive Security seems to have restructured the partitioning scheme and boot loader. Now, when I perform a "cgpt show" command, I see one chrome os kernel partition, one boot partition, one root partition, and a script partition. It seems the previous boot loader is now using a u-boot loader. This definitely no longer matches the documentation on the Kali site.

When I reboot into the SSD card, the basic boot loader is loaded, but it cannot find the vmlinux.uimg file on the SSD card. It then fails to boot and leaves me with some sort of basic shell (google snow? u-boot?).

Has anyone run across this issue? Can anyone duplicate it or confirm it? I downloaded the image from the torrent, perhaps the direct download link has been fixed? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I didn't take the time to manually write down and copy lines of output, but if necessary I can.

[steev]

If you want to use a 16GB SSD card, it may be easier to generate your own. I hope to do a post soon, explaining the new way that the chromebook images are generated (all of the arm images, in fact) and explain a bit more how to customize them to people's needs.

I have run into a similar issue, and unfortunately this way IS actually better, because upstream is no longer providing some of the files that were previously used to create the images, and to create them again, would require rebuilding an old version of chromiumos, which, in the grand scheme of things, isn't the way forward.

Give me about a week, and I should have something up that explains how to use the build script and point it to using an sdcard instead of an image file (or if you're familiar with linux, you can attempt the modifications to the kali arm build scripts - available at https://github.com/offensive-security/kali-arm-build-scripts - you want the chromebook-arm-samsung.sh script - I know documentation is lacking at the moment, but that will be fixed soon.)

[kg4dkf]

Steev, would you be kind enough to help me? I am having a problem that sounds like what was described above. I purchased a Samsung XE303C12-A01US Chromebook. I turned on developer mode. I then downloaded the 1.0.6a image from http://images.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-1.0.6a-chromebook-arm-samsung.img.xz. I extracted the img, and I wrote it to a 16 GB SD card using Win32DiskImager. Then I entered crosh, and did this:

shell
sudo su -
cgpt repair /dev/mmcblk1
cgpt add -i 1 -T 5 -P 10 -l KERN-A /dev/mmcblk1
cgpt add -i 2 -T 5 -P 5 -l KERN-B /dev/mmcblk1
crossystem dev_boot_usb=1

When I boot and hit Ctrl+U, it starts to load an OS. It says that it is starting USB, 1 USB device(s) found, invalid boot device, about 20 lines of errors, and finally File not found /boot/vmlinux.uimg

I can think of two possible problems, either the ramdisk isn't initializing (or something to that effect), or the device is trying to boot from the USB even though I've used an SD card. Can you shed any light on this?

Thanks!

[kg4dkf]

Okay, so I did some more digging and I have fixed my problem. I wanted to post this right away so that you wouldn't waste time replying to me. And in case someone else has the same problem, here is what I did:

First, I found Stahna's post at https://forums.kali.org/archive/index.php/t-171.html which explained that my problem was that I didn't dd the image right from the Chromebook.

Then I took my Samsung Series 3 Chromebook and inserted my SD card (it seems that a USB will work too, just slightly different cgpt commands).

I booted Chrome (already in dev mode) and downloaded the image file there.

I hit Ctrl+Alt+F2, that told me how to set the password for chronos, I Ctrl+Alt+F1 and opened crosh (CTRL+ALT+T) and hit shell and then sudo su - and finally the command given earlier to set that password. Now I hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 again and:

cd Download
ungz <image-name.img.gz>
{wait a while}
dd -if=<image-name.img.gz> of=/dev/<device-name> bs=512k
{wait a while}
sudo cgpt repair /dev/<device-name>
sudo cgpt add -i 1 -T 5 -P 10 -l KERN-A /dev/<device-name>
sudo cgpt add -i 2 -T 5 -P 5 -l KERN-B /dev/<device-name>
sudo cgpt show /dev/sda
reboot

Then when it booted up I hit CTRL+U and Kali loaded just fine!

I hope that helps someone else. It took me 3 days of searching (admittedly not searching very hard) to get this far. Now I'm going to buy a 64 GB USB drive that hardly sticks out at all and try to use that instead. That way I can apt-get install kali-linux-all and still have tons of room for my personal applications. If all goes well, I might buy a second while they are still on sale (Tiger Direct refurbished for $130 after rebate)!!

[wetfeet2000]

Thanks KG4DKF. I was able to resolve this issue with Steev's writeup on this thread, https://forums.kali.org/showthread.php?20519-resize-ssd-after-install-using-16GB-samsung-chromebook&p=32393, since I was also using a 16GB SSD. With your write-up, were you able to use the entire 16GB? (It looks like your commands don't resize the partitions)