Method and apparatus for booting from a flash memory

A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium that provides instructions that, when executed by a processor, will cause said processor to perform operations 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;
• reading a 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 boostrapping code image, produces more parity data that can be stored in the written page's spare area;
• and
• executing the first bootstrapping code image.