View Single Post
Old 01-16-2013, 11:23 AM   #29
Cylv1
Junior Member
Cylv1 began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 4
Karma: 10
Join Date: Jan 2013
Device: Several, including Kobo Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by freekobo View Post
Well, what I did was put KevinShort's image to a spare sd card.
I made an image of the second partition (recovery_fs) and then I applied the image over my broken second partition. I tried a recovery..it worked...and then it updated, I checked the SN again, its the same as it was when I got it.
So PeterT is right, "the serial #'s are NOT loaded from the recovery partition".

But, your experiment does not proove that SN is not read from the microSD card.

Have you tried to run your kobo using the spare sd card made from KevinShort's image ? I wonder what the serial number would be.

Quote:
Originally Posted by freekobo View Post
I made a image of my sd..my SN has 4 occurrences...but on KevinShort's image I located the first one all 0's, the second one I found searching for 'deviceSerial' and located his SN, and then searched his image using his SN...it came up with 12 occurrences.
BUT I searched his SN in my image, and was unable to find any occurrences. KevinShort's Image also has text from a book in it...which I found odd....
I have no idea what to make of all this, but ya...thats what I did & found.
I tried to find the SN of my device in the image I made from the microSD card. I found 15 occurrences (in my previous post, I had found 2 occurrences starting with SN-###, where ### are the first 3 digits of my kobo's SN, this time I only looked for the actual number, without "SN-").
These occurrences are located at the following offsets (in hex this time):
-- 203
-- 211D0063
-- 211F3000
-- 2120C000
-- 23BB5000
-- 29DE8000
-- 31FD1000
-- 338B3000
-- 39D8D000
-- 421E0000
-- 421EA000
-- 421F8000
-- 4220C000
-- 42232000
-- 42BB1A03

I do not know anything about partitions tables and so on, but if the first and second partition sizes are both 256 MB, I expect the first 256 MB of the image file to belong to the first partition (rootfs) and the next 256 MB to belong to the second partition. In this case, everithing before the offset 1000000h would be expected to belong to rootfs, everything between 1000000h and 2000000h would belong to recoveryfs and everything after 2000000h would belong to KOBOeRedear fat32 partition.

Actually, there is no occurrence of the SN anywhere between 1000000h and 2000000h.

Moreover, I suspect the first partition not to start at offset 0.

I would then guess that :
  • The first occurrence of the serial number is the "original" serial number that is actually read by the device's OS to get the serial number.
  • Other occurrences of the SN are located somewhere in files stored on the KOBOeRedear fat32 partition (some system files, but also some book-related database)

I am not surprised that the KOBOeReader fat32 partition retains footprints of files related to books that may sometime have been stored there : as far as I remember deleting a file on a fat32 partition only removes informations about this file in the file allocation table but does not really delete the file (this is the principle that is used for recovering deleted files).

I would be curious to see what would be the SN of a device for which a factory reset would be made from an SD card where the first occurrence of the SN (the one that is located at 200h in the image file) would not be removed (or would be faked).
Cylv1 is offline   Reply With Quote