Quote:
Originally Posted by noobyme
okay clearly i just dont understand data blocks, so are you saying we cannot have images of only the 3 partitions? we must include the unpartitioned space at the beginning? I see its only 24mb, I hadnt chekced when i made the earlier comment, but id asumed u provided only the three partitions so as to ensure peopls vcoms values remained the same
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You seem to be assuming that all Kobo ereaders have a vcom value stored in that area and all Kobo ereaders have a waveform table. The waveform table is only present when you have a eInk display with Regal capability.
Quote:
Originally Posted by noobyme
google says first 512bytes are the master boot record = partition tables, so we include that then skip the next 20mb or so? do u really need the mbr if the partitions are the same across sd cards?
o apparently that space also has the bootloader wow im learning so much!
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If you want it to boot, you need the MBR (or a GPT). If you want to write a utility that allows skipping portions of the source or destination, have fun.
Quote:
Originally Posted by noobyme
do you think my idea is a good one? to not include the waveform?
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Being honest, no. The chances are good that a slightly mismatched waveform table would be better than none. And one of my recommendations is to use a new µSD card. Very often the issues are due to the card having problems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by noobyme
how do ppl know exactly where these files are located in unallocated space? ive tried using data recovery software but ive no clue what the file is called
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Most of the data stored in the unallocated area is not stored as a file but rather as blocks of raw data. If you are lucky, you get a length written at the start of the block but there is no filename. I mostly use a hex editor to take a look at the image data.
Quote:
Originally Posted by noobyme
also how did u get ur zip folders so small? my 16gb img only halved in size. sorry i know i am asking a lot of questions, but u seem to have all the answers i search for, u said u repeated zeros or something. u wrote zero to the empty spaces, yea?
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Basically, I imaged a flash drive from the Kobo image, copied the contents of the FAT32 partition to a directory on my computer and then made sure quick format is not checked and formatted the partition. This wipes the deleted but not overwritten data by overwriting with whatever value is used (0x00, 0xF6, 0xE5 and oxFF are ones I remember being used (the 0xFF is likely the most popular now being used for solid state storage)) and then copied the files back to the partition, recreated the image and then compressed it. Those repeated fill byte strings compress very enthusiastically reducing the image size and allow me a bit of piece of mind knowing that stray data is not floating around waiting for someone to use an undelete utility or similar to try to recover it.
In the case of your image, you can do the copy/format/copy back with your ereader mounted to your computer though that would be slow. Mounting the uSD card directly to your computer is faster but for Windows, you end up with issues if you don't pay attention. I've used the MiniTool Partition Wizard to format the FAT32 partition on the mounted µSD card.