How do I make a disk image of an imbedded system?

[MASONTX]

Does anyone know how to go about making a disk image of an embeded system? I bought a netbook with flash rom instead of hard drive for holding the OS and settings. I want to experiment with flashing a later version of Android to the rom, or Meego, but want to be able to go back to the factory set up if I screw it up. How would I clone the drive and reinstall later if need be? The netbook has usb drives and SD card slots, but no cd. If the Android 2.1 OS gets borked, I'm not sure if the USB drives would work, or if the system would be bricked.

[rayburn]

Not sure that it is possible to clone ROM, but does the BIOS have any option for booting from either usb or SD drive?

That would be the most obvious route. In any case, flashing ROM is a business fraught with danger, you could easily brick it!

[arespi]

Are you sure it is flash ROM?. Several laptops and netbooks use a Solid State Drive that you can read and write as a regular disk, from there you can use something like clonezilla to clone an image.

Good luck

[MASONTX]

Yes, flash rom. This is one of those cheap Chinese netbooks, $85, and uses an Arm11 cpu with 8GB flash rom. I've finally gotten it to download android apps without telling me "no phone associated, download terminated". I wanted to scream "Of course there is no phone associated, it's a netbook". I downloaded, but haven't tried yet, an app to give me a terminal so I can reach the underlying linux kernal, so probably wont have to flash the rom with a new OS. From what I've learned, the arm cpu has so many unique configurations of cpu and hardware, that no attempt is made to come up with standard profiles. This means any linux distro would have to be custom written for your hardware. Guess I will stay with the included Android 2.1. Now if I can just get the wireless working...

[MASONTX]

As far as I can tell so far, there is no bios. Everything appears to be flashed to the rom by the manufacturer (now out of business). If the terminal app works, I may be able to figure out how to get it to boot from the SD card or USB.

[rayburn]

Good luck with the terminal, if you can get it working it will it at least give you more options.