14, 15 eMMC Boot Guide

WARNING: Advanced users only! A good SD is not far enough off from eMMC performance to warrant risking your Switch, so you better know what you are doing.

Prerequisites

• Full eMMC Backup (boot0/1 and rawnand.bin)

• (Partition Manager) PC

• (Partition Manager) hekate v6.4.0 or later

• (Manual) PC running Linux

• (Manual) GParted, gdisk

WARNINGS

• Repartitioning, resizing, and flashing your eMMC will destroy your HOS (stock Switch OS) install; you MUST have a backup if you ever intend to use HOS again (this can be achieved with hekate (Tools -> Backup eMMC -> eMMC BOOT0 & BOOT1, eMMC RAW GP)

• You currently cannot dual boot Android installs on SD and eMMC due to a super partition lookup bug in Android

• We recommend this to advanced users only--the gain is marginal and not worth accidentally nuking your Switch

Installation (Partition Manager)

This approach uses hekate's built-in eMMC partition manager, added in hekate v6.4.0. We recommend this solution as it is easy, robust, and officially supported.

1. Follow installation instructions (nx, nx_tab) up until SD partitioning step (files should be in switchroot/install and switchroot/android)

2. Adjust bootloader/android.ini from installation instructions to include emmc=1.

3. Enter hekate's eMMC partition manager by pressing and holding the "Partition SD Card "button (Tools -> Partition SD Card) for 5 seconds

4. Adjust partitions to your liking (we recommend 16GB for Android, though it should be usable with >=8GB)

5. Press Flash Android to flash the files in switchroot/install/ (the files will be erased after flash)

6. Press "Continue" to reboot into Android recovery

Installation (Manual)

This approach does not utilize hekate's built-in eMMC partition manager and is mostly here for legacy documentation and support. We recommend using the above method.

eMMC preparation

1. Erase your eMMC or shrink the USER partition

2. In hekate go to USB Tools -> Set Read-Only to OFF -> Mount eMMC RAW GPP

3. In a new Terminal run sudo gdisk /dev/<disk> (where `<disk>` is your the mounted eMMC)

4. x (enter expert mode) -> s (resize partition table) -> 128 (set max entries to 128) -> w (write changes to disk) -> y (confirm write)

5. In GParted open your disk and create the following partition in the same order

Partition Name	Size	File system
boot	64MiB	unformatted
recovery	64MiB	unformatted
dtb	1MiB	unformatted
misc	3MiB	unformatted
cache	60MiB	unformatted
super	5922MiB	unformatted
userdata	Custom	ext4

Flashing the eMMC

1. In a terminal use dd to flash the following partition accordingly e.g. sudo dd if=boot.img of=/dev/<disk><boot_partition_number> bs=32M

File	GPT Name
boot.img	boot
recovery.img	recovery
nx-plat.dtimg	dtb

1. Create the following file on your SD Card in bootloader/ini/android.ini

[LineageOS]
l4t=1
boot_prefixes=switchroot/android/
id=SWANDR
icon=switchroot/android/icon_android_hue.bmp
logopath=switchroot/android/bootlogo_android.bmp
r2p_action=self
usb3_enable=1
emmc=1

1. The rest of the guide can be followed as-is