[olpc-help] Help, I screwed up!

[Anonymous]

OK--here's the story:

I had some pictures that I was keeping on my usb storage device.  In order to back them up, I copied them to my XO.  I then decided to update the build on my XO to 650.  I realized that I would have to reformat my USB device to give it enough room to accept the ,img file, so that's what I did, and I loaded the .img file on my usb device.  Then I got distracted and did something else.

So I came back, and forgetting to load the pictures back on the USB, I plugged my usb into my XO, and rebooted holding all four game buttons down, like it says in the instructions.

A screen comes up representing the blocks of the NAND, and it quickly cycles through with black boxes (checking for bad blocks?).  Then it slowly starts to draw green boxes over the black boxes.  When it gets to the second line of green boxes, I realize that I forget to move my pictures off of the machine! So I power off the XO before the image rewrite/upgrade process has completed.

What a dumbass.

What I am HOPING is that the first blocks of the NAND are occupied by the OS, so that my pictures haven't been overwritten yet.  I am aware of the fact that the bits MAY already have been overridden, but because the OS probably occupies the initial blocks, and because the green boxes had only progressed to the second line, I think that it is likely that my pictures are still there.  But even if they haven't been overwritten, I have no Idea how to access them.

Does anyone know if it is possible to boot an XO without a viable NAND flash from a USB device?  If I were able to boot from a USB device, would I be able to access the blocks of the flash that contain my jpeg data?  And is it possible that those files are still in any condition to be copied/moved out to be put back together on another machine?

I am very willing to do what ever hacking is necessary to make this happen, but I need to be pointed in the right direction.  Is anyone out there who knows this system at a low-enough level to indicate how I might and is KIND enough to provide some guidance?  Your assistance would be DEEPLY appreciated (and would also provide a record to the forum of some of the details of the boot process ;-) ).

Thank you so much for your consideration.

-"deeply embarrassed"