Patent ID: 8171277

Claim:
A computer implemented method for booting a computing device with a flash memory without knowledge of parametric information of the flash memory, comprising: receiving an input requesting the computing device to begin operation; executing a set of one or more instructions stored in a first memory of the computing device, wherein executing the set of instructions performs, locating the flash memory, and configuring a first read routine for accessing the flash memory based on a common denominator format of candidate flash memories, the first read routine able to access data in the candidate flash memories, the common denominator format does not fully utilize the capacity of a page in the flash memory for at least one of the candidate flash memories, and the first read routine is not configured based on information located in a flash memory identification table; writing a first bootstrapping code image into one or more pages of the flash memory, wherein for each written page of the first bootstrapping code image, using only a subset of the page's data area for data information and at least a portion of the page's data area remaining for error correction parity information; reading the first bootstrapping code image from the flash memory, according to the first read routine, into a volatile memory of the computing device, wherein the configured read routine using an error correction algorithm that, for each written page of the first bootstrapping code image, produces more parity data than can be stored in the written page's spare area; and executing the first bootstrapping code image.