It's not you, but rather the frickin closed-source firmware and Windows installer program. They insist on destroying a perfectly good partition layout, even when *not* running a builder image. I'm just using a bit of guesswork to try and prevent that.


Yeah, I'd really love to have some serial port messages, except the stupid software won't work over anything other than pathetically slow serial -- even on Linux we at least have an ethernet-based upgrader (open-source, too!) that runs at perhaps 100X that speed.

I really don't know why I persist in wasting my time to help Windows users with software that I don't need/use here. Stupid me, I suppose.

As for the "prevented 48258" message, there was also a "prevented 0" message too, which goes by so quickly you don't have time to read it. And hopefully also a "prevented 63" message.

Sector 0 is the master partition table, sector 63 is the linked-list entry for hda5, and sector 48258 on your disk is (0 + 63 + 63 + 63 + (2 * 24034) + 1), which was supposed to be the partition table linked-list entry for the swap partition, hda6. But I may still not have that one correct. EDIT: Yeah, looks off by that final +1. Fixed.

If it manages to prevent all three of those, then the partition table layout should not change.

I guess it didn't manage it. I'll try and beef up the messages some more, though that's very difficult to achieve here.

I'll respin it again (V7), with a couple more messages. This time, run the builder (I'll remove the safeguard, so you won't need to manually un-build the drive first), then run the software .upgrader, and watch carefully once the empeg logo appears on the screen (after the kernel is reflashed).

Write down the numbers you see, and post them here, along with the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda".

That should be enough info for me to nail it properly next time around (or we might get it this time..).

Cheers