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Old 10-25-2012, 03:03 AM   #13
hawhill
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Posts: 1,379
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Goettingen, Germany
Device: Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo Mini
Quote:
Originally Posted by asymptote View Post
  1. Where is Das U-Boot on the Kindle that the ARM processor looks for and boots
  2. Is it safe to erase? Can it be restored?
  3. How can it be backed up/restored? With which tools?
  4. What are the differences between the tools?
Have a look at the sources of k3flasher. I did put in a bit of documentation for what I could tell at that point.

Erasing, rewriting etc. of the uboot loader is not a problem at all. k3flasher comes with a shell script that will backup the distinct parts for you.

Uboot is stored at the beginning of the eMMC flash device, following a MBR but not itself being within a partition. Same goes for some other parts like serial number/MAC address information, kernel, stuff for the e-ink driver.

That is followed by the first partition containing the rootfs, then there's the configuration storage mounted on /var/somethingIforgot and the user partition. The last one is a bit special since it contains an MBR, too, for faking a full disk with one partition when exporting that partition via USB.

I'd be quite interested in the outcome of your project, especially the initialization stage for the SoC. If I were in your position, however, I'd still go with uboot, I think. Mainly because the source code is readily there and working (admittedly, I've never compiled it myself).
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