[E3-hacking] Understanding the E3s Partitions

Sat Apr 13 13:02:16 BST 2019

Its Cliff Lawson not Clive,who is Clive.. What Clive Sinclair … 😊

“Aren't PBL and Uboot two distinct separate things?”
Yes I know they are but mtd0 is where boot (like the bios on a PC) would be so PBL or Uboot would be there.

Example..  https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3,16789,16800<https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3%2c16789%2c16800>

device nand0 <orion_nand>, # parts = 5
 #: name                size            offset          mask_flags
 0: u-boot              0x00200000      0x00000000      0
 1: uImage              0x00300000      0x00200000      0
 2: uImage2             0x00300000      0x00500000      0
 3: failsafe            0x00800000      0x00800000      0
 4: root                0x07000000      0x01000000      0

active partition: nand0,2 - (uImage2) 0x00300000 @ 0x00500000

defaults:
mtdids  : none
mtdparts: none

I videoed the install but I shorting it so its like 22 minutes long. Its took about a hour and a half to do, the backing up of the E3 took the longest, flashing Linux took about 2 to 3 minutes because the OS is not very big. but if you want Linux on your E3 you don’t need to install it, the Installer is a ramdisk so you can test it on that. Its like FEL mode. I just want to record it for my channel on You Tube and false me to have to restore it.

Its say on that website.. “If you need to restore mtd1 to mtd4, then calculate the number of blocks for each mtd (i.e. a block is 128K, 1M is 8 blocks)”

 Erase mtd0:

#flash_erase /dev/mtd0 0 16
Erase Total 16 Units
Performing Flash Erase of length 131072 at offset 0x1e0000 done

flash _erase line I got from this site but it will not delete the right amount of blocks.
So 16 units make the block size 131072 so what is the unit for block size 16384,mtd0 to 5 are all the same block size..?? I am not great at maths…lol

Thank for the help Ralph..😊 Once I get this working again I move on to the E2(Amstrad E-M at iler<mailto:E-M at iler> Plus)..😊

Spanner..

From: Ralph Corderoy<mailto:ralph at inputplus.co.uk>
Sent: ‎Saturday‎, ‎13‎ ‎April‎ ‎2019 ‎10‎:‎03
To: Discussion of the Amstrad E3 emailer hardware/software<mailto:e3-hacking at earth.li>

Hi Nick,

> mtd0 - kernel
> mtd1 - PBL ( Maybe, I say this because Uboot is flashed there.)

Aren't PBL and Uboot two distinct separate things?  PBL was written by
Clive at Amstrad.  On the E2, it's the sole occupant of the small 64 KiB
flash so it isn't at risk of corruption when it writes to the main 8 MiB
flash.
https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Finputplus.co.uk%2Fralph%2Femailer%2Femailerplus.html%23hardware-ics&data=02%7C01%7C%7C98de71a5da4c439d992708d6bfeeecbb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636907430224288747&sdata=LqkjcsSy62DcL04jS5U0mhtqVbReqh9NVioinst3eyk%3D&reserved=0

> What are mtd2 and mtd5 used for..??
> Trying to find out what each Partition is used for?

If you have extracted the contents of those partitions then start poking
around their contents.  file(1), hexdump(1), etc.  And Google some
resources on reverse-engineering flash blobs to identify their contents.

> One of the problem with the E2 is it don’t run Linux
...
> The E3 had a different CPU because it need a MMU for the Colour LCD
> screen so need to be more powerful than the E1,E2.

I think Clive wanted to take advantage of Linux for the E3, given its
higher, more complex, workload and thus needed the MMU.

--
Cheers, Ralph.

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