[olpc-help] Help, I screwed up!

[Richard A. Smith]

Anonymous wrote:
> Yes, there is no backup image, but might there still be latent data 
> stored in the NAND?  I started the NAND overwrite process but did not
>  complete it.  Can I boot the system off of an external image and get
>  access to the NAND that way?

The first thing the re-flash does is erase the nand blocks and erase
really means erase.  The process of erasing a nand flash sets the bytes 
to 0xff

>> 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.

The black squares are each block as it gets erased.  Since you got to 
green boxes (writing the data) the nand was fully erased.  I'm sorry but 
your data was destroyed.

Oh and just FYI the red squares are bad blocks which are tested and 
marked bad at the factory.  All nand flash has some amount of bad blocks.

-- 
Richard Smith  <richard at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child