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Old 11-16-2011, 01:51 PM   #31
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hieronymos View Post

This morning I went into this recovery - pressing Volume Up before turning the device and turning it on normally. I stay on Volume Up and the device starts working, reboots and all data is gone (except for /sdcard). It doesn't ask for any confirmation, so I don't want to try again right now :-)
That is interesting - but are you sure the system files were not modified as well? I think I did my tries my pressing two or three button combinations more or less simultaneously - and apparently by pressing and holding button(s), and then pressing the power button once can actually trigger something. Have you tried other buttons as well in this fashion? I'll try myself, once I produce a bit-identical backup micro-SD card.
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Old 11-16-2011, 02:38 PM   #32
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According to the log in /data/system/dropbox, it simply wiped the cache - that is

Factory data reset
0: Install Success
Starting recovery on $date
[...]
Command: "recovery" "--wipe-cache"
[...]
Formatting /data...
Formatting /cache

The stock Facebook 'application' (the one that opens in your browser) didn't come back.
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Old 11-16-2011, 03:38 PM   #33
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Does somebody have a micro USB to plain female USB adapter? Mine is arriving from China in a month :-)
According to Freescale docs, there is a USB host on the board. Would be nice to figure out if we can use it.
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Old 11-16-2011, 04:31 PM   #34
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Quote:
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Does somebody have a micro USB to plain female USB adapter? Mine is arriving from China in a month :-)
According to Freescale docs, there is a USB host on the board. Would be nice to figure out if we can use it.
That's good news! Do you know what could be possibly used under Gingerbread with USB host enabled, if anything? Things like USB keyboard, thumb drives, bluetooth adaptor, perhaps even USB GPS dongle?

Unfortunately, I don't have the adapter.
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Old 11-16-2011, 05:34 PM   #35
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hieronymos View Post
Does somebody have a micro USB to plain female USB adapter? Mine is arriving from China in a month :-)
According to Freescale docs, there is a USB host on the board. Would be nice to figure out if we can use it.
http://www.canadacomputers.com/produ...item_id=029464 ?
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Old 11-16-2011, 06:24 PM   #36
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We'd still have to see if Kobo didn't explicitly design the tablet in order to disable the host. But if they just put the plug where it should be, then it should be quite easy to at least hook up a keyboard. I'd even guess the necessary libraries are still in the OS. Bluetooth and GPS dongles should be easily doable in a custom ROM, since the interface is USB anyway most of the time. Somewhen, over at Archos, they were discussing the development of 3G modem driver as well. Don't know what happened with that.
Personally I'm only interested in the keyboard :-)
Well, I'll wait for the package then.
And really, I'm surprised by the excellent documentation over there. There are even instructions on how to solder a 3G modem to the chip on the board that actually supports it........
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Old 11-16-2011, 06:41 PM   #37
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Thanks for the link! I was actually there an hour ago, bought class 10 8GB micro-SD (11$). I am currently running

dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0 of=/dev/block/mmcblk1 bs=4096

on my Vox (fingers crossed).
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Old 11-16-2011, 06:49 PM   #38
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I've asked a mod to sticky this thread. I hope they do .
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Old 11-16-2011, 08:01 PM   #39
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So I tried swapping the internal 8gig SD card for a 32 today. I made a disc image using R-Drive Image 4.7 (which expanded the 5.3 gig FAT 32 free storage partition to fill the extra space on the bigger card, but the Kobo Vox wouldn't boot up. Replacing the original 8 gig card still works fine, no loss of any of the apps I've put on. Can any of you more tech-savvy types comment on this? Is it a lost cause because of something I don't know about?
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Old 11-16-2011, 08:23 PM   #40
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R-drive is a windows program - you'd rather use the native program (linux, or Kobo itself); also, I don't see the fat32 partition - the 3 partitions mounted by default are all ext4.

I did the most conservative thing - a clone to an identical (8GB) micro-SD card, using Kobo itself (I gave the "dd" command 3 posts ago). I'll try to test it outside of Kobo for now, but also will have to disassemble Kobo one more time, for a real test.
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Old 11-16-2011, 08:36 PM   #41
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Be aware - 8GB micro-SD cards come in slightly different sizes. Good thing the one I used for a backup image was slightly larger than the internal one (not the other way around). The internal card:

bash-3.2# fdisk -l /dev/block/mmcblk0

Disk /dev/block/mmcblk0: 7948 MB, 7948206080 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 242560 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/block/mmcblk0p1 1441 9633 262144+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk0p2 9633 26017 524288+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk0p3 26017 66977 1310720+ 5 Extended
/dev/block/mmcblk0p4 66977 242560 5618686+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk0p5 26018 58786 1048576+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk0p6 58786 66977 262082 83 Linux

The copy:

bash-3.2# fdisk -l /dev/block/mmcblk1

Disk /dev/block/mmcblk1: 8270 MB, 8270118912 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 252384 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/block/mmcblk1p1 1441 9633 262144+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk1p2 9633 26017 524288+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk1p3 26017 66977 1310720+ 5 Extended
/dev/block/mmcblk1p4 66977 242560 5618686+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk1p5 26018 58786 1048576+ 83 Linux
/dev/block/mmcblk1p6 58786 66977 262082 83 Linux


It all looks identical, except for the slightly larger total size of the new card. The partition sizes are identical, so the card should be a perfect replacement for the internal one.
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Old 11-16-2011, 10:16 PM   #42
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I'm an eye doc with a little web programming experience. I'm really out of my comfort zone here. I'll leave it at that for now and monitor this thread. I will eagerly await new developments on this front...
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Old 11-16-2011, 10:33 PM   #43
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One last message for tonight...the Vox is really forgiving re dis and re-assembly. Robust. I don't want to just make a backup 8 gig internal SD card, I want to expand the internal card to 32 Gigs, and complement that with a 32 gig external card as well. I want to hack the thing so I can put a zillion apps on it without worrying about running up on a storage wall. I'm happy with it as is, but more is better. I can run vids less than 400K in size no problem, but if I try to play a 3gig HD movie, it balks. I'd like to be able to access android market, but I have no devices listed. Any comments would be much appreciated! Thanks, all.
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Old 11-17-2011, 12:16 AM   #44
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Okay, I've been told by the Kobo team that there is no hardware button combo that get you into recovery mode. From my own understanding I also know that the Factory reset simply deletes personal data.

However, being able to take the entire internal memory out and play with it gives me hope that I can eventually write a program that'll back everything up and install alternative Android builds.

The picture below shows you how the 8GB card is partitioned on the Vox.



There is a block of 45 MiB of unallocated space at the start of the card. Unless they're doing something weird, this looks like it's actually just empty space or a bootloader.


Next, there's a 256 MiB ext3 partition which I believe is the boot partition and includes the core Linux install and all that fun stuff.

Next is a strange little 512 MiB ext3 partition that seems to contain just a backup of the recovery?

We then get an extended partition with two ext2 logical partitions inside. The first is the "data" partition, which is the main system storage partition (not to be confused with the internal "/mnt/sdcard" partition). Some personal data & internal apps go here. The second logical partition is some sort of cache or swap space.

Finally we get a 5.36 GiB fat32 partition. This is the /mnt/sdcard, the main user accessible storage. This is the only partition that becomes visible when connecting your Vox to your computer and contains nothing exciting.



Theoretically speaking, by installing something else in the first primary partition and the first logical partition (the boot partition and the data partition) we should be able to install a custom firmware.

Now the hard part is getting that all working.

Last edited by jefftheworld; 11-17-2011 at 02:44 PM.
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Old 11-17-2011, 07:10 AM   #45
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I wonder why the internal "mount' command reports all the four partitions to be ext4. I'll check my clone SD with Gparted, to see if there are any differences.
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