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Originally Posted by arivero
Hmm the problem is that such menu, if existing, would appear in ttyS2, the serial port inside the box.
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Nope. Display could be anywhere. Zaurii have a special program in their BIOS (resp. the counterpart for that architecture) that can do reflashs. It would be useless to have that menu in the OS, as you couldn't recover from kernel bugs.
So far I see four possibilites:
- You can boot into an alternative mini-OS. The flash drive (/dev/tffsa) has a size of 245M. Sound strongly like there's some 11M hidden, which could very well contain reflash software.
- The connector contains a JTAG interface. This is absolutely common for embedded devices, and would provide both hardware and software developers some means for debugging.
- There's a special controller that would reflash when some magic code comes in through usb/network/whatever. This is how the reflash software of the Zaurii worked.
- Special key combos to reflash on power-on.
The Iliad is essentially the same architecture as a Zaurus. I bet they did something similar. Notice early Zaurii (5000/5500) don't have an integrated boot menu, but both reflash with magic code and pressing C+D+Reset worked.
Also they *must* have a simple way to reinstall the device. It would be developer's hell for them otherwise.
I think we need to attract (more) hardware guys in this forum. I suck when it comes to hardware.