Honored Contributor
Honored Contributoreehh..., nobody loves you siclone not even one answerd to your question. i am investigating the same thing. firstly, from what i suspect you must have 2 partitions on your sd card. and by some secret it turns out that both must be primary drives. none of them should be logical. you can create those by mini tool partition wizard. secondly, handbook tells us that
"The SD/MMC flash has a MBR that points to a specific offset at the start of the partition. The partition is of type 0xA2, a custom raw partition type without any file system. The preloader image tool always places the output image at the start of the output binary file, regardless of the target flash memory type" from this, we may assume that your micro sd Partition 1 should simply have all zeroes all over the place. without formatting. without any file sistem nor ex2 not fat just nothing. and we may assume that sd you are having has similar content inside. and there is no viewer which will let you to view contents of unformatted drive (at least from what i know)... tried few hex viewers all of them went crazy. by mini tool partition wizard you can create small partition without any format and fill it by zeroes then change the partition ID of that partition to 0xa2. you will find all the necessary tools in that software i suggested. then create second partition with fat 32 (or ex2 in case of linux ). your preloader will be uploaded to that crazy first partition and u boot will get into fat partition by using these tools "SD Card Boot Utility" and "Preloader Image Tool" both of which are built into EDS command shell which you will find in c:\altera\<whatever version you have>\embedded folder . and after some magic woodo commands that are described in this document https://www.altera.com/en_us/pdfs/literature/ug/ug_soc_eds.pdf you may or may not succeed in your goal heh... i am stuck exactly here. so tell me if you will find my help useful and share your experience as well . everythiong i wrote here are purely my assumptions and suspicions so i may very easily be wrong in something. you'l find some intriguingly interesting information about QSPI Flash on this post http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42412&page=2&highlight=preloader+partition (by the way, i also am messing with SoCrates :))) )
