First, there are basically two parts to flashing your agenda: o LOADING (transferring the file from your computer to the agenda's memory) o FLASHING (telling the agenda to put what you just loaded into memory down onto the flash chip) Now, with that in mind, I bring you the following points about why flashing your kernel and romdisk is really quite safe. 1. Even if a flash goes horribly, horribly wrong, your agenda can still be easily restored to full working condition as long as you have the 'PMON' prompt. 2. The PMON area of the flash can be write-protected so that you can *never* overwrite it accidentally, therefore assuring that point 1 is always true. This procedure is highly recommended for all users, and is documented both in list archives and the vrflash documentation. 3. So what happens if your agenda, your computer, or your flashing software crashes during the LOADING phase? Nothing. It is completely harmless. All that has happened is you didn't completely load the appropriate file into the agenda's memory. But since ram is volatile and you haven't issued a flash command yet, nothing has really happened to your agenda. You could, if you wanted, restart your agenda immediately after a failed LOAD phase and it would be just as you left it. Generally you can just retry the flash immediately if your upgrade fails during the LOADING phase and all is well. No need to fear this. 4. But what happens if your flashing program (vrflash, minicom, etc) or your computer crashes while FLASHING? Again, probably nothing. Your agenda will probably still finish the flash as expected. Why? Because all the terminal program is doing at the time of flash is issuing a single command to the agenda that tells it what to flash where. Once that command has been accepted by PMON and is processing, it will continue to do so regardless of whether or not your client computer or terminal software is online to watch it. 99% of the time this won't even necessitate a reflash. So you really need not fear this either. 5. So what happens if your *agenda* dies while flashing? In this case, you'll probably have to reflash. The reason is because the agenda more than likely finished only X% of the flash, but not all of it. This is kind of like installing half a kernel or half of Windoze. It won't work until your agenda survives a complete flash. But even still, if we review point 1, we can rest easy knowing that soon we will have a working kernel and romdisk again. Simply replace your batteries and reflash. So as you can see, the only two things to worry about are keeping your agenda alive while flashing and write-protecting PMON so you never overwrite it. The first is easy to fix: flash with fresh batteries. The second is just as easy and takes about 30 seconds after you read the docs. If you follow those two simple rules, you never need to sweat while flashing your kernel or romdisk. Yes, flashing PMON is another animal altogether, and it shouldn't be attempted by novices (or sane experts). Should you ever choose to do it, sweating, uncontrolled shiverring, and mild convulsing are to be expected. But really, even when flashing PMON, you only need to be concerned with your agenda dying in the middle of the flash. A failed load, or your computer dying after sending the flash command should still be safe for the reasons outlined above. So if you're going to upgrade PMON, be very, very sure your batteries are good and that you know what you're doing. Hope this helps, Jeff -- Jeff Carneal - jeff@soldmy.net The opinions expressed above aren't really mine. They belong to someone else who also refuses to take responsibility for them.
