Today I went on to research the process of formatting a storage card programmatically. I decided to do this after I tried to advise someone in the MSDN forums, without clearly understanding what's involved.

After digging around for a while I came up (thanks to XDA-Developers) with the following:

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{

 STOREINFO fd = {0};
 fd.cbSize = sizeof(fd);
 DWORD dw = GetFileAttributes(_T("\\StoreMgr"));
 HANDLE hFind = FindFirstFileW(L"\\StoreMgr", (LPWIN32_FIND_DATAW)&fd);

 WCHAR szBuffer[255];
 wcscpy(szBuffer, L"\\StoreMgr\\");
 wcscat(szBuffer, fd.szDeviceName);
 HANDLE hStore = CreateFile(szBuffer, GENERIC_WRITE|GENERIC_READ, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, 0, NULL);
 DWORD dwErr = GetLastError();

 FindClose(hFind);

 STOREINFO si = {0};
 si.cbSize = sizeof(si);
 PSLGetStoreInfo(hStore, &si);

 BOOL bfmt = PSLDismountStore(hStore);
 bfmt = PSLFormatStore(hStore);

 return 0;
}

What can I tell you... Kids, don't try this at home. What I have totally forgotten is that the typical PPC device contains several flash memory stores, some of which hold the ROM (that's why you can “flash” device, right?) and some - OS snapshot (on WM5 where RAM is persisted in the flash).

Stepping in the debugger through the above I got to the line that calls PSLFormatStore. It failed. The device froze. Essentially, I cleared the ROM on the running device - typically the first step when flashing the ROM update. This is very similar to running format c: on DOS.

Soft reset - nothing (just a blue Imate boot screen)

Hard reset - nothing. It did say something about formatting the flash memory, but that was the extent of it.

Fortunately I had a ROM update sitting around and that worked.

Here is the corrected code:

#include "stdafx.h"

#define FIRST_METHOD 0xF0010000
#define APICALL_SCALE 4
#define HANDLE_SHIFT 8
#define HT_FIND 8
#define HT_FILE 7

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
 /*
 Store enumeration
 STOREINFO storeinfo = {0};
 storeinfo.cbSize = sizeof(STOREINFO);
 HANDLE hFindStore = FindFirstFile(L"\\StoreMgr", (LPWIN32_FIND_DATAW)&storeinfo);
 while( FindNextFile(hFindStore, (LPWIN32_FIND_DATAW)&storeinfo) )
 {
 }
 */

 WCHAR szBuffer[255];
 wcscpy(szBuffer, L"\\StoreMgr\\");
 wcscat(szBuffer, L"DSK1:"); // DSK1: is hardcoded for simplicity
 HANDLE hStore = CreateFile(szBuffer, GENERIC_WRITE|GENERIC_READ, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, 0, NULL);
 DWORD dwErr = GetLastError();

 BOOL bfmt = PSLDismountStore(hStore);
 bfmt = PSLFormatStore(hStore);

 STOREINFO si = {0};
 si.cbSize = sizeof(si);
 PSLGetStoreInfo(hStore, &si);

 bfmt = PSLCreatePart(hStore, L"PART00", 0, si.snBiggestPartCreatable >> 32, si.snBiggestPartCreatable, TRUE);
 HANDLE hPart = PSLOpenPartition(hStore, L"PART00");
 bfmt = PSLFormatPart(hPart, 0, TRUE);
 bfmt = PSLMountPartition(hPart);

 PARTINFO pi = {0};
 pi.cbSize = sizeof(pi);
 HANDLE hFind = PSLFindFirstPartition(hStore, &pi);
 while( PSLFindNextPartition(hFind, &pi) )
 {
 }

 PSLFindClosePartition(hFind);

 CloseHandle(hStore);

 return 0;
}