[Samsung Captivate Glide] NyxTheDarkness:
Hi!

I sort of forgot about this thing for a while and I just remembered it earlier today and spent all day going back through everything and relearning it all!

After going through all the steps again I got stuck again at the same spot, which well, no surprise there.

Reading your reply which I actually didn't notice last year and thus didn't know about before today. I built busybox from latest source and replaced the busybox binary I was using before and yes, the boot.img I extracted from the rom I had downloaded (cm 11) was 11.5mb so I assume the boot partition's at least 11.5mb which is usefully much bigger than your 5mb, although I do wish my phone had a slide out physical keyboard but those are impossible to find in a flagship phone now I guess.

With the latest binary, I was able to mount the sd card and the internal storage. Though I'm unsure as to if it was the modern version of busybox that made this happen or something I had done at the same time that seemed insignificant. On a side note, the binary I built was only 1.4mb and the binary that I had downloaded that was from 2013 was 1.1mb so there actually wasn't much of a size increase although it is possible it's due to the fact they were compiled differently since I compiled busybox with Linaro toolchain and the unstripped version was 8mb which was before the toolchain optimized it I'm assuming.

For some reason, even after being able to mount the root filesystem, something was going wrong and it ergo wasn't booting, but then I realised something, I have no idea how this worked for you actually, since in the init script in the ramdisk, there's this bit.

exec /sbin/busybox switch_root /mnt/root /etc/init

Looking at this, it's easy to think "Ok nothing seem wrong there" except hang on a moment, I was trying to follow what this line does manually and then I found out that uhm, '/etc/init' is a folder in the root filesystem, not a script.

What it should have been instead was (I'm assuming of course, but it did work so even if it wasn't meant to be that, it does work and that's good enough for me)

exec /sbin/busybox switch_root /mnt/root /init

In the root filesystem that you provided, the "Debian environment boot init script" is available at /init not /etc/init.

With that all sorted, the GNU/Linux enviroment boots up relatively perfectly fine, I'd guess from the logs.

Except, android's not booting up, at least it doesn't appear to be operating from my perspective which is visually by looking at the screen and thus the phone hangs on the 'HTC' logo with nothing updating the screen. In the logs, it says that Debian waited for Android to boot and all and since it didn't hang on waiting for Android to boot, I assume that Android has booted but something is very obviously not functioning for it's intended purpose.

Now, then I started doing some experimenting and I noticed that when I unpack the boot.img and then repack it with no modifications, the resulting boot image is 7.5mb even though the origin was 11.5mb, "ok, maybe there's some optimizations to save space" was what I thought when I saw that and then out of desperation I decided to see what would happen if I flash the repacked boot img, it should boot up just fine into Android I figured.

Except, no, curiously, it just went into a reboot loop never getting past the 'HTC' logo screen.

Flashing the orgin 11.5mb image however will cause the phone to boot up into Android perfectly normally.

So it seems that now the issue is when I repack it, something's different that isn't correct except it's seemingly correct enough to boot up a GNU/Linux environment but it's not correct enough for the Android rom (cm11) I have installed to boot as it should.

I have no idea what is causing this but tomorrow I have plans to try with a different ROM to see if the issues are the same.

For the moment, it's 3:41am though, and I'm a liddle tired.

2 round of edits:

It's actually 3:54am now and I'm going to restore my phone to before I wiped it so I have a functioning phone for tomorrow, I hope that backup went ok, I just realised I never checked them oops

3rd round of edits:

wow lots of minor typos, it's 3:58am, I'm sure they may be more erros but I'm sorry, it's 3:58am and I still need to make my phone functional to for tomorrow again so I'm ending the post here also thank you for all of your help that yo've given to me and any other humans and non-humans if they read it too.