[General Questions and Answers] swonsay:
S0unds you seem to be the one who would know this, and I'll happily help where I can, give me a task and with what little free time I don't have I'd be happy to assist. I'm not a dev, but I've managed to hobble some ugly code from bits of syntax that slowly worked up to something more complicated and eventually became a huge benefit at work.

This is what I've done so far, I've tried dd'ing all the mmc's (eg: /dev/block/mmcblk0p2 ) I'll go through them one by one and see if I cant mount them in windows with a loop back and try and figure out which is which if needed.

I'm new to the entire modding phone thing and I cant brick another phone my boyfriend will... Well he won't do anything except give me that dirty look again, but I'd prefer to avoid that.

What I would strongly prefer is to start with the kernel, by my fear is if it doesn't boot that the device is bricked, does anybody know if there is a way to recover it or how that would go when the only option is odin? I've tried looking/reading around but I'm not quite sure. Also, I cant get adb access until after it boots up.

The more access to information I have along these lines now the better, because I quite frankly just don't understand. I get that even if I wipe the required programs (AGAIN) from the system partition it can be recovered from odin, provided I have the files to put on them. I assume this means I have a kernel?

Is the recovery/odin tool in the boot loader, an equivalent to grub?

If so provided I don't hose that, the kernel and the system and practically everything else can be wiped correct?

I assume that the manufacturers put out a fairly streamlined kernel, but many of the mods seem to focus on the kernels, how much of a gain is there in attacking that aspect of it first? I don't think it will take me long to make the ROM I would want, its, well... simplistic. I don't want anything that will slow the phone down unless I need it.

Does anybody have a known good factory-stock firmware odin file just in case I do decide to hose my kernel and or system again?

Do we need a complete mapping of the drives? Or is the information we need already out there?

Currently the drivers are installed, odin 3.34 is working, I have adb access, and I've rooted it. I've backed up EVERY file with titanium backup, and then I saved that directory. I then removed some bloatware (maybe not all yet) and backed it up again with titanium, and then dd'd all the files. I wasn't able to or didn't dd the following:

mmcblk1p1 (apparently too large -- according to dd error (around 4g of data is where it stopped))

mmcblk1 & mmcblk0 (both of these are a bit redundant and most likely WAY to large)

any of the vold/* files (was going to try, but am running out of caffeine now)

The plan was to restore the files with titanium to stock, and then pull another img of system. Then to test odin by overwriting this with my smaller system image. and if it doesn't work then trying the larger one, I'm just not 100% sure on which files are where, hence backing up EVERYTHING.

I'm confused at why mmcblk1p1 is so large!

I assume that mmcblk0p1 @ 106,496Kb is the kernel. I want to be sure before I do anything so I have a reasonably sure way to get back.

If I understand correctly we need an image of the system, kernel and recovery partitions. The first 2 I get, I'm still reading up on what exactly a recovery partition is.