I'm attempting to write the ROM image for my Palm LifeDrive to a 4gig Compact Flash card. Rather than doing anything resembling anything like any normal setup, Palm chose to split a Microdrive into three partitions.
First is a 64 meg "RAM" partition. Second is a 22 meg "ROM" partition. Third is the rest of the drive as a FAT32 partition which is only accessible to the Palm OS on the LifeDrive. (It can also be accessed as USB Mass Storage using the DriveMode app on a
working LifeDrive.)
Following some instructions to use Python I've extracted and assembled the ROM from the Update 2.0 download from Palm and added the special header info to it. Got that far with Python for Windows.
I downloaded the partition table.sct file from someone's blog, who'd done this with Linux.
What's giving me problem is dd for Windows flat out doesn't work correctly for the next step, it always says error 87, it doesn't understand the conv=notrunc command, so I'm going to try DSL.
What I need is access to my USB multi-card reader from within DSL, either running in quemu under XP Pro SP3 or booted directly off a USB pen drive.
Here's the relevant section from the how-to.
Code:
If you're using a USB CF reader /dev/XdX will be something like /dev/sda. With a IDE->CF adapter it will be something like /dev/hdc.
Write the partition table to disk:
$ dd if=table.sct of=/dev/XdX conv=notrunc
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
And now the actual ROM partition:
$ dd if=rom-partition of=/dev/XdX seek=134079 bs=512 conv=notrunc
40001+1 records in
40001+1 records out
Put the microdrive back in your LifeDrive, reconnect the battery and with any luck, watch it boot PalmOS. The other two partitions will be automatically formatted by PalmOS, so you don't need to worry about them.
Where would be the best or easiest to get to place on the pen drive to put a directory containing the table.sct and rom-partition files?
The reason I want to do this myself is I only paid $80 for the PDA and I'm a cheap ba$tard who's not going to pay $75 to $90 for Palm OS preinstalled on a $25 memory card.
(Dang certain the sellers of those cards are violating Palm's EULA!)
