Quote:
Originally Posted by shyhermit
Ah.. That is too bad. Thanks for the warning, DNSB. In Windows, with a non-USB connection, such as SATA or IDE (old standard), it is possible to image a disk to include all partitions, regardless of the partitions' format.
Do you know of a way to "image" the entire Kobo eReader through an USB connection to include all partitions, including all "hidden" (usually inaccessible) partitions?
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If the entirety of the disk is exposed, no problem. The problem is that I am not aware of any ereader that exposes the entire disk over the USB connection.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shyhermit
By your logic, if I use the ImageUSB utility, I basically am doing a backup of the exposed partition of my Kobo eReader? If this partition is ruined, can I at least use this backup to restore the partition to prevent Xenophon's situation?
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Why bother? A simple copy of the contents of the exposed partition works as well as an image backup and makes access to the contents much easier.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shyhermit
Moreover, Pgaskin.net has links to all of the firmware .zip to current Kobo devices. Is it just the same to download one of those .zip for the said device (such as the Libra Colour in my case or Clara HD in Xenophon's case) and unzip to overwrite everything in the exposed partition to "reset" everything?
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Once again no. The overwhelming content of the firmware package is copied to the system partition on the Kobo during the install process. Very little if any is copied to the exposed partition. If you look at the files in the upgrade .zip file, the upgrade directory contains hardware specific updates and kernel updates, the KoboRoot.tgz is the rest of the upgrade. Looking at KoboRoot.tgz, I checked 7 firmware revisions and in none of them, did /mnt/onboard contain anything other than an empty .kobo directory.
If you remove the µSD card from a Kobo ereader and mount it on computer, you will find a chunk of "free space" where the serial number and boot related bits live, 2 ext4 partition (system and recovery), a FAT32 partition (the one that gets exposed over USB) and then some free space at the end of the disk which as far as I know is unused. BTW, the two ext4 Linux partitions are why many a poor fool has read and obeyed Windows request to format their µSD card.
I have played with doing a backup of the full disk in a Kobo ereader over a network connection but the problem is finding a way to restore that backup on a device that is not booting and had non-removable storage.