FAT partition Backup/Restore

Hi,
I need to create a procedure that will allow the user to backup and
restore data from the FAT partition available on our CE 5.0 device's
internal NAND flash storage. I basically need to create a mechanism
that will create a bin file containing all the data- much like the one
Norton Ghost creates on a PC. The entire procedure needs to be
implemented in the bootloader.
Does anyone have any suggestion on what would be the best approach to
do the above?

Dean
Mon May 12 09:21:11 PDT 2008

Where are you going to backup and restore to? You're going to run into
issues if you try to use the bootloader because you typically aren't going
to have access to external storage.

You're also going to have to deal with bad block management - you can't do a
byte for byte copy of NAND flash and put it on different media (or even the
same media at a later time).

--
Dean Ramsier - eMVP
BSQUARE Corporation


"ohady" <ohady@fourier-sys.com> wrote in message
news:76cfbf3a-831d-4d53-975c-035fdcecf090@z72g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
> I need to create a procedure that will allow the user to backup and
> restore data from the FAT partition available on our CE 5.0 device's
> internal NAND flash storage. I basically need to create a mechanism
> that will create a bin file containing all the data- much like the one
> Norton Ghost creates on a PC. The entire procedure needs to be
> implemented in the bootloader.
> Does anyone have any suggestion on what would be the best approach to
> do the above?

ohady
Tue May 13 07:05:16 PDT 2008

On May 12, 7:21=A0pm, "Dean Ramsier" <ramsiernos...@nospam.com> wrote:
> Where are you going to backup and restore to? =A0You're going to run into
> issues if you try to use the bootloader because you typically aren't going=

> to have access to external storage.
>
> You're also going to have to deal with bad block management - you can't do=
a
> byte for byte copy of NAND flash and put it on different media (or even th=
e
> same media at a later time).
>
> --
> Dean Ramsier - eMVP
> BSQUARE Corporation
>
> "ohady" <oh...@fourier-sys.com> wrote in message
>
> news:76cfbf3a-831d-4d53-975c-035fdcecf090@z72g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
> > Hi,
> > I need to create a procedure that will allow the user to backup and
> > restore data from the FAT partition available on our CE 5.0 device's
> > internal NAND flash storage. I basically need to create a mechanism
> > that will create a bin file containing all the data- much like the one
> > Norton Ghost creates on a PC. The entire procedure needs to be
> > implemented in the bootloader.
> > Does anyone have any suggestion on what would be the best approach to
> > do the above?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

Hi,
1. I wanted to send the backup image through the USB client port to
the desktop through a serial connection. Same procedure will be used
the other way around for restore.
2. One of the ideas was to implement FAT support into the OS and use
it to read files from the NAND this way. There's even a limited
implementation of FAT in Marvell's Littleton devkit. How ever we
haven't figured out a way to safely to perform the actual process
without arming the directory structure.