There comes a moment in every PMA owner's lifetime when that super-slick application designed for the Zaurus (the one that does *exactly* what you need -- you know the one) is installed and then promptly FUBARs your PMA. Whether it's disabling the touchscreen, freezing the OS or worse, we've all been there.
Before openPMA (days not missed, in my opinion) you could backup before installing any application simply by archiving the aimage.img and progfs.img files. If an oops-moment came, we could just connect to USB and restore the .img files.
openPMA 0.2 (Giraffe) introduced a hidden, second partition that offers many stability advantages but makes backup a bit trickier. Since this partition essentially replaces the progfs.img, we want to protect it against evil. Luckily, Thomas of openPMA has shared the following advice to back up this partition:
If you want to play it safe, just backup your second partition beforehand -- it's as easy as typing the following line into the Terminal:
dd if=/dev/ahd/disc0/part2 of=/media/System/part2-backup-20070308.img
If you want to save space you can bzip2 or zip it on your desktop afterwards. On the PMA itself it would take ages.
If you want to restore the backup, do the following:
- Drop the openpma 0.1.1 aimage.img into the System folder of the first partition (0.1.1 doesn't use the second partition thus you can use it as a ''tool'' here)
- Reboot
- Go into terminal and type (decompress image beforehand if necessary!):
dd if=/media/System/part2-backup-20070308.img of=/dev/ahd/disc0/part2- Place the 0.2 aimage.img (you don't need openpma.img at this point) back into the System folder and reboot.
Voila! your pma just restored its state at the time of backup!
Thanks, Thomas. We (literally) could not have done it without you!
