I have an Asrock G10 which works fine with stock firmware.
I received a second one in order to try OpenWrt
the first thing i did was to wire a serial port in order to save the original partitions
so i try the command
cat /dev/mtd0 and I have errors
msm_nand_read_oob xx000 800 0 fails -74 corrected 0
it really bothers me that I can't save firmware partitions
Not the answer you want, but mtd0 is probably uboot, which isn't usually a partition you would overwrite.
If it'd break, you won't be able to make a recovery without a flash writer.
i have:
/tmp # cat /proc/mtd
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00040000 00020000 "SBL1"
mtd1: 00140000 00020000 "MIBIB"
mtd2: 00140000 00020000 "SBL2"
mtd3: 00280000 00020000 "SBL3"
mtd4: 00120000 00020000 "DDRCONFIG"
mtd5: 00120000 00020000 "SSD"
mtd6: 00280000 00020000 "TZ"
mtd7: 00280000 00020000 "RPM"
mtd8: 00500000 00020000 "APPSBL"
mtd9: 00080000 00020000 "APPSBLENV"
mtd10: 00140000 00020000 "ART"
mtd11: 03000000 00020000 "rootfs"
mtd12: 00060000 00020000 "BOOTCONFIG"
mtd13: 00500000 00020000 "APPSBL_1"
mtd14: 03000000 00020000 "rootfs_1"
mtd15: 00040000 00020000 "hwconfig"
mtd16: 00040000 00020000 "nvram"
mtd17: 00010000 00001000 "m25p80"
mtd18: 001d1000 0001f000 "kernel"
mtd19: 00a2c000 0001f000 "ubi_rootfs"
mtd20: 021aa000 0001f000 "ubi_rootfs_data"
for security I want to save all the partitions it's a bit annoying
this error does not occur with all partitions
maybe we can save the entire memory with dd?
The dd for the whole flash should fail too, but I'm only guessing.
What about booting an OpenWrt initramfs image (as you have serial console access) and using nanddump (nand-utils) from there.
The ASRock g10 is rather special in this regard, as it is a dual-partition device, while OpenWrt only uses a single partition of those - leaving the other one intact; so even after flashing OpenWrt, you can still go back to OEM easily (just switch to the other partition (/sbin/asrock_g10_back_to_factory) and off you go).