Here's my crazy idea. Tell me if it's realistic.

Would it be possible to build a ROM image that boots up, loads hardware drivers, and looks for GRUB on all available data stores? I'm intrigued by the idea of having a full-fledged Debian install sitting on a CF Microdrive, and having it get booted up straight from the CF card instead of clogging memory with copies of the OS files.

Yea? Nay? Already done?

900c can do it... its bootloader supports loading an image from a CF card.

it would be hard to do it for the netbook pro. you would have to insert it at the start of the kernel image, maybe. and this requires some hexediting for sure after writing a special routine that would do this.

The HaReT loader allows for this from within CE, but it's not a ROM image or anything like that.

hmm ok if you just mean autorunning haret that can be done fine if someone uncompresses that darn netbook pro image for editing it and then compress again to flash it

Edited by cmonex 2007-10-02 3:48 PM

I don't understand a single thing you guys just said. I should have paid more attention in Assembly Programming class.

uncompressing? nothing to do with asm

Let me rephrase what I'm looking for.

Would it be possible to write a ROM image that completely does away with the existing OS, and instead emulates the functions of a standard BIOS, i.e. hardware detection and seeking/execution of a disk-based boot sector?

sure, write one. have fun.

Hmm. Write a new ROM, completely different from what anyone else has done, from scratch. Now there's a daunting task.

Not sure I understand as I thought it would be quite easy: the netbook pro bootloader is easily accessible and allows loading of an image from CF or SD?

well this is not documented anywhere. what about you make a proper post or something so we all know exactly what the netbook pro bootloader is capable of ?!

for starters, how do you load an image from CF? what kind of image?

how do you get into bootmenu? what can you do there?

is there any hidden menu? what does it do?

etc...

and, do you know how to package up a custom image? the official ones i downloaded seem to be compressed in a special way. it seems to to use inflate by adler but i could not get it extracted that way.
this is a problem, so not sure why you think it is "quite easy" unless you know the secret


p.s.: i documented all that publicly for the 900/900c bootloaders. that's why i ask...

Edited by cmonex 2007-10-03 1:07 PM

Turn the unit on holding down Ctrl-D

As for how the stuff is structured, no idea, however given that there's images of BooSt, PCON and the OS out there I would have thought it possible to reverse engineer it in the way that other stuff has done? Really don't know tho!

What is BooSt again?

Does the Ctrl-D trick have to be done after a hard reset?

Edited by deusexaethera 2007-10-04 1:52 AM

bah, so no documentation. :/ can you at least tell me how to reformat the flash (i remember someone discovering that). also, what items are listed in the bootmenu? i dont have a netbook pro. reverse engineering this is not so trivial but of course that's what i did with the 900c too.

boost is the bootloader. i dont know what pcon is.

Edited by cmonex 2007-10-04 4:02 AM

aha, I thought you had a netbook pro - my apologies.

BooSt information; http://www.nijdam.de/psion/BooStDongle.pdf

Not sure if the author of that ever put anything else up around Boost, but it'd be worth contacting them...

I believe the Angstrom project have done something around this, too?
http://www.linuxtogo.org/gowiki/NetBook