[TriLUG] Create EXT3 compact flash devices from Windows

Rodney Radford rradford at mindspring.com
Wed May 27 01:34:59 EDT 2009


As part of my $WORK, I build embedded devices based on Linux, and in the current system, the user can update the firmware by swapping in a new compact flash card.  All that works great as long as I can send the customer the CF in the mail.

However, one of the requirements is to allow the customer to download an EXT3 image file and copy it to a new CF image through a USB/CF adapter. This is trivial in Linux - just a dd - but the problem is that the customers are primarily using Windows based system and could care less that Linux exists on that embedded hardware they are using.

I know one option is to ship out a Knoppix CD that the customer can insert into his Windows PC, boot it, and have it create the CF (possibly even having it automatically 'phone home' to see what updates are available).  However, I was wondering if there was any other options - specifically, something like RAWRITE that can run directly on the Windows box. This would allow them to simply download the .img file, even download the utility, and then run the utility to create the CF.  This seems like something that would be possible, but my google searches are coming up empty.

Any thoughts?




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