Miscellaneous geek tools.

Hi there,
I stumbled across your marvelous range of tools while searching for information on hard resetting WM5 devices.  You seem to be about the only developer to have tackled the programmatic device wipe, which is where I am stymied.
As a developer I cannot distribute yours, and I am getting nowhere fast with my own.
I figure that I need to shell ClearStorage.exe if it exists in the windows directory but there is no documentation on the parameters. 

At this point I even suspect that this is what MS relies on for it's MSFP device wipe, and fully expect ClearStorage.exe to become ubiquitous as MSFP ships.

So...Vijay555.  Am I on the right track and as the command line king, would you be so kind as to share the parameters for ClearStorage?

Fredbasset

Fred, almost right... basically, I've reverse engineered ClearStorage on each HTC phone that I've come across.
As you may know, WM5 removes the ability to force a hard reset using kernel IOCTLs in the way that we could on WM2003.
However, since ClearStorage can, I thought I'd just figure out how it's implemented there are re-implement it myself.

I'm sorry to say that it's not a generic solution, but I will find one, if it kills me!
But seriously: read this excellent blog on how to implement a WM5 hard reset -
http://blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/archive/2006/02/09/How_OEMs_implement_Clean_Boot_on_WM5.aspx

and then cry when you realise that it only works if the OEM (ie HTC) has implemented it at platform builder level.

Have a read through this thread where I've discussed further:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=33087&highlight=vjeschaton

If you need any other IOCTLs that I haven't already posted, let me know.

V

NB - I just "upgraded" to the Mio A701 yesterday, and it doesn't have clearstorage

Hi Vijay,

Were you able to find out how to hard reset windows devices for other OEM's? I Tried VJEschaton0.2.exe on Samsung and lg device but it was not able to hard reset.

Can you please let me know if there is any way to hard reset Windows devices in general.

Thanks,
Pras

Pras - I believe you would have to format the storage (not storage card) area.
Check the sdk for code to format it - I wrote some code to do this but was too afraid to test it!

The way I did it in VJEschaton (which was HTC only) was to reverse engineer the standard "clear storage" apps that come with HTC tools, but the above should be a generic solution.

V

Hi Vijay..

Would you share which API u used for trying to clear storage area. I am ready to test the code u have written on the device...it would be great if you could share with me..


Thanks,
Pras

Hi Pras.

Can't remember now, it's been a long time. VJEschaton duplicates the functionality in HTC's Clearstorage app (literally. I reverse engineered ClearStorage), but if you wanted to write your own code, I believe you have to write a low level formatter and format storage yourself, effectively hard resetting.

There is code to do this in the WinApi SDK.

V