AYN Odin 3: backup

I acquired an AYN Odin 3 Ultra in the hopes to run a complete Linux environment on it.

This starts my explorations with a full backup of the stock Android storage.

I needed:

• edl-ng
• iqoo_13.melf from AYN's Discord
• A udev rule to let users access USB devices

After powering the device while pressing volume up and volume down at the same time (display goes black after flashing AYN's logo), I could examine the partition tables in my fish shell with:

for lun in (seq 0 5); echo === $lun ===; edl-ng --loader iqoo_13.melf printgpt --lun $lun; end

The full map is available as a gist.

To back up, I ran:

for lun in (seq 0 5); edl-ng --loader iqoo_13.melf dump-rawprogram --lun $lun $lun/; end

From there I can mess with the system as much as I want, and to restore it to stock Android whenever needed with:

for lun in (seq 0 5); edl-ng --loader iqoo_13.melf rawprogram --lun $lun $lun/rawprogram0.xml $lun/patch0.xml; end

Thanks to gio on the AYN and Rocknix Discord servers for all the help.

In the next installment, we'll switch to a bootloader that supports systemd-boot.