Hi,

I would like to completely back up the image I have in flash, before going to instal something else on it.

I found no completely satisfying answers in the forums I read till now.

I explain better the need.

I have a DM800, since one year and I am very happy about it. I installed an 8 Gb USB key and a 250 Gb HDD. I still use the image in flash I found when I bought the box: it's an early *******, seconstage #61; later I installed Barry Allen 4.6.2. However since the box freezes each couple of days I would like to test something more recent and maybe stable such as Black Hole 0.11. I tried it on USB keys but it crashes immediately like some other images. I read that this might depend by the secondstage flash very old I have. For this reason I believe I need to put the Black Hole on flash.

Here comes the problem. I do not want to risk to loose all of which I'm pretty satisfied of. I would like thus to be able to come back to what I have now, in case I would not be satisfied of what I'm going to install.

I tried to follow several ways:

1) Web interface at boot. This leaves you the possibility to back up the image but that image cannot be used to be restored.
2) Using Barry Allen? When saving the original flash in nfi format B.A. complains about not finding "secondstage.gz" file.
3) DreamUp allows you to flash but not to save a flash installed image.
4) I found somewhere the following commands to be issued via telnet:

cat /dev/mtd/3 > /tmp/backup.img

and viceversa for restore to flash:

cd /tmp && eraseall /dev/mtd/3 && cp backup.img /dev/mtd/3 && reboot

However I'm not sure they work and neither that "eraseall" command does exist on my box. I am not sure also that these commands saves secondstage #61 I have in my DM800 now.

Is out there anybody who knows a safe method to back up everything, not just a piece of this or that, allowing me to be sure in coming back in case of problems?

Thank you very much in advance.

Thank you for yours answers.

Well I might have a lot to loose in the case I would not get the same features I had with the original internal flash firmware and possibly would not be able to come back to what I had because not backed-up.

After a long searching on the web, I finally found a way to save the flashed image in a .nfi file.

it is later possible to put that image even on a USB pen. All of this just using Barry Allen and only providing to it the file "secondstage.gz" it says it is missing.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.digital-kaos.co.uk/…/images/smilies/proud.gif]

Since there may be somebody interested to know how, I drop few lines of descriptions.

I learnt how, just looking to the attached script file, which was originally made for DM600.

the procedure could be the following:

1) retrieve a secondstage file from the following URL:

http://sources.dreamboxupdate.com/do...e-dm800-69.bin

if you need a different secondstage version replace the 69 with the version you want. I would suggest to retrieve the same second stage you have on your flash image.

2) put it on /MB_IMAGES on your DM800

3) gzip it with the following command:

gzip -c /tmp/secondstage-dm800-69.bin > secondstage.gz

4) Now Barry Allen should be happy, because the secondstage.gz is now present and it should be able to generate the .nfi image.

That's it.

Nothing difficult. The problem was only to find where to retrieve the secondstage file on the internet. That previously indicated link seems to me to be a hidden one.

Regards