Steps for Multiboot support of Single and Multi-SDCards Partitioning and Image Flashing automatically

Precondition for used SD Card

All the SD cards should be fully formatted. Use Disk tool to cleanup SD card data. Ignore Precondition steps if SD Card is fresh and empty 

Also, this method can be followed for single card multi boot flashing as well 

Note: These steps are not required for brand new SD card and you can skip

Deletion of partition using Disk tool in Ubuntu:

1) Select particular SD card from left hand side panel and click on '-' symbol of Disk tool

2) Click on Delete button to delete any particular partition

3) Finally deleted all the partitions:

4) After clean up the data in SD card, plug out it and plug in again.

Prerequisite Steps -  Preparing for flashing SD Cards

1) Keep all the below files in same location:

1.  Broadband image to be flashed
2.  Video image to be flashed
3.  extract.sh script file    

extract.sh

1. multiSDcard_partition.sh
2.      threadSD.sh

     vi) Create a file (For ex. sudo vi sd_part_size) where all the SD card partition names and their respective sizes are mentioned

2) Connect all the SD cards with host PC and execute the command : sudo fdisk -l  . It will list all the SD card partitions with their respective sizes

3) Write all the partition names and their respective size in a text file (as created earlier as sd_part_size). Please don't copy the colon(: ) displayed at the end of the partition name and the word "GB". There should be single space between partition name and size.

For example content of sd_part_size looks like:

[Here we have taken 1 SD card of 16GB and 3 others of 32GB each.]

4) Execute the script below:   

bash multiSDcard_partition.sh <Broadband image> <Video image> <SD card details_filename>

For example:
bash multiSDcard_partition.sh rdkb-generic-broadband-image_default_20191009085525.rootfs.rpi-sdimg rdk-generic-hybrid-refapp-thunder-  image_default_20190924125426.rootfs.rpi-sdimg sd_part_size

Multiboot Feature : Switching to RDK-Video Image from RDK-Broadband 

• Each SD card will contain 4 partitions now

•  Now Boot up the SD card in RPI-> it should come up with BB image in partition (P2)
•   Log into the R-Pi from Host PC execute the below command
  • ssh root@<RPI-Board IP>
• To load the video image which is present in the storage execute the script bank_video_switch.sh

Switching to Video Image

Note: Have tested with 4 SD cards out of which 1 is 16Gb and rest of the 3 cards are 32GB each. Overall process took approximately 6min  time to get completed. Host PC having 8GB RAM. 

           For Broad band image size around 300 MB and video image (thunder) size around 700 MB

           SD card size mentioned in input text file should always be in GB but with format as provided in the steps mentioned