Download flash?

[greengene]

is there a utility that will allow me to download flash?
sort of a backwards FLA command in the monitor?
i really don't want to walk through it all doing MD.b.

my problem is i'm getting :
Error Checksum Fail
No Valid app

and everything that i've looked at so far looks ok.
i'd like to find where it differs from my s19 and see if i
can tell if/where i'm trashing some of it some how.

tia

[greengene]

ok, i never thought hypertem would keep up...
so i just did a "capture text" of the MD.b and got what i needed.
i'll just wite a QND compare program and find that bad boy...

[tod]

I had a similar problem not too long ago. Mine started with a bug that caused the NB to crash. The trick was to break into the monitor on a COLD BOOT, not a warm boot caused by the NB resetting. Once I powered on, I did a SHIFT-A immediately and did a serial port download and it worked.

[greengene]

i found 4 bytes at 0xFFC46444 had been zeroed.
now all i have to do is find out why...

[rnixon]

Thats getting pretty low level. What platform do you have? How are you downloading the application? Did you try downloading the factory pre-compiled .s19 from the original folder?

[greengene]

it is a mod5282.
problem didn't happen during download/upgrade.
this unit had been running for months since last s/w change.
there have been several(?) power cycles w/o incident.

we've had problems with power cycles during flash writes -duh,
but not just 4 bytes.

i don't expect any h/w problem. this is probably just a bad
pointer somewhere...argh!

well at least i've now got a tool to do a comparison. we usually
just look at the checksum to verify what program is loaded but
in this case that wasn't available.

thanks.

[rnixon]

Ok, that makes sense. One problem I had with power cycles is that I was reading and immediately writing the user parameter area on power-up. That created a problem when my power supply was not completely stable quick enough, and the write to flash was writing all over the place. I changed the code around so it didn't do the write until later on and it solved the problem.

[greengene]

just when you thought it was safe to go outside:

so, i said, let's put some write protect around the program in flash
except when we are updating. on the mod5282 we can do that
easily enough using the coldfire flash module(cfm). but (isn't there
always a but?) we're migrating to the mod5270 and it does not
have a cfm - argh!

i'm feeling like that cox commercial: "I wonder what else I might not know?"