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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Hack Windows Mobile ROM

Peace be upon you

How are you? This post will be short but it will be valuable, for people who do windows mobile development, I found something that may look good for most of them.
While I was missing up with the Platform builder files, some files catch my eyes, files like
romldr.h
This file seem to be related to ROM issues, as you know there is memory types in Windows mobile, Extended ROM, and after that there is file has attribute "FILE_ATTRIBUTE_INROM", until now I don't if this header file will help to extract files from ROM or not, but I am sure the this file will need DeviceIoControl, because all this file have is constants like this
IOCTL_BIN_GET_E32
IOCTL_BIN_GET_O32
IOCTL_BIN_GET_XIP_PAGES
IOCTL_BIN_SET_E32
IOCTL_BIN_SET_O32
IOCTL_BIN_GET_ROMHDR
The problem now is how to find the appropriate structs that help in dealing with it with no problems, you know if you tried missing up with this stuff you may lose a device, I don't know how bad the damage will catch your device if you miss use them, Thanks to GOD we have emulator :D, but it still not safe to miss up with such functions on real device.

one more thing that is really cool, Windows mobile have partitions concept to spread data between ROM and extended ROM and memory, what I mean that there is partition where the extended ROM placed, how do I know that, just check this link, it is for reference called "Bootpart Reference "
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa911532.aspx

I hope that this post was informative.

BR
Ahmed Essam
P.S: I think the only one who may find it useful is someone trying to hack Windows Mobile ROM.

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