Dual Booting on the UConsole

uConsole
, ,
1

Hello everyone!

I’ve been working on setting up dual boot on my UConsole—one system for playing retro games and another for security testing. Since managing both on a single SD card is quite complicated, I decided to try a hardware-level solution for dual booting. After some searching, I came across this handy SD card switcher on AliExpress:

SD Card Switcher on AliExpress

The Setup:

I’ve got two SD cards—one running Debian Bookworm and the other running Parrot OS (both images from Rex - thanks to him). At first, things didn’t work as expected. But after a bit of research, I found a solution that worked perfectly. Here’s the resource I used:

Geekworm Dual Micro SD Card Adapter Wiki

How to Fix the Booting Issue:

If you’re trying something similar, here’s a simple summary of the steps I followed:

  1. Backup cmdline.txt: Use this command to backup the file in case something goes wrong:
sudo cp /boot/cmdline.txt /boot/cmdline.txt.bak

For Bookworm, the file is located in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt.
2. Edit the cmdline.txt: Open the cmdline.txt file and find the line that looks like this:

root=PARTUUID=xxxxxxxx-xx

Replace it with:

root=/dev/mmcblk0p2
  1. Add a Debug Quirk: Append the following at the end of the cmdline.txt file:
sdhci.debug_quirks2=4

Now, I can easily switch between operating systems. All I have to do is power off the UConsole, flip the switch on the SD card adapter, and boot from the SD card I want!

bookworm
bookworm1920×2560 256 KB

parrot
parrot1920×2560 274 KB

4 Likes
2

Have you tried something like that ? GitHub - procount/pinn: An enhanced Operating System installer for the Raspberry Pi

3

PINN won’t work on the uConsole without a lot of work.

4

Pardon me for nosing in but I came across this thread and since I’m interested in dual booting the uConsole and have been doing some digging, I thought I’d throw the question here (please note that I am not an advanced user by any means but I’m also not afraid to try stuff - as I like to say, I know enough - or can understand instructions - to fix what I break! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Has anyone looked into BerryBoot? I just started to read about it and, apparently, one could install any OS images and setup dual boot with it. I’ll continue to read and try to give it a shot using a couple of Rex’ images (awesome work, by the way - I wish I could do something to ensure you get a uConsole soon and I’m sure a lot of people here feel the same way!)

1 Like