Did my Phatbox firmware get f'ed up??

[Geed]

I got a VW Phatnoise for my New Beetle. Went through the ISO hack proceedure and patched the original DMS. Put that DMS into the Phatnoise and the headunit displayed that it was playing Track 1 and just stayed there. I let it sit for 5 minutes then turned the head unit off. Turned it back on and the head displayed Track 1, then quickly jumped to Track 2, then back to Track 1 and stayed there - all the while I didn't hear any voice acknowlegments from the speakers at all, no startup message, nothing.

I turned the radio off and removed the DMS - both lights were off.

Then I swaped out the original hard drive with an 80 gigger and popped it into the cradle to complete the hack proceedure. All the messages I saw on the screen indicated that everything was successful.

When I put the new larger DMS into the Phatnoise and turned the head unit on I heard a voice saying over and over, "empty disk, empty disk" repeating. Turned the head unit off, went back to my PC and loaded some songs using Music Manager. Popped it back into the Phatnoise and got a weird blinking pattern - red light stays on and green light blinks slowly about 14 times, then it resets and does that same thing over and over.

Swapped the original hard drive back into the DMS and tried that one again. This time I get a red light and a fast blinking green light that goes forever. Both hard drives now show these problems and nothing is working now.

I can see both drives in the Music Manager fine. I can read from both and copy music to them. Thought I might try the rescue thing or upgrade firmware but the Phatnoise site is dead.

Can anyone tell me if I toasted the firmware in the Phatnoise? If so, how can I fix it?
Or, do I just get a new original DMS and everything will be fine?

Thanks for the help!

[markbowen]

As the masters on this forum will tell you, you can do lots of things to your phatbox without f-ing it up.

Basically the problem you're having now is that the patch is only partially executed on your phatbox.  There are some bugs in the hack disk that still aren't sorted out.  You don't need a new original DMS, you need to figure out how to complete the patch.

Open the phtsys partition on your original DMS, and find the file called ramdisk.sig.  Delete that file, then copy any other file (linux.sig, for example) to your desktop, rename it ramdisk.sig and move the file back to the phtsys directory.  Then pop that DMS back in your phatbox to let the patch run again.

This is what works in many cases.  Audi/VW boxes can be trickier, so you may have to search the forums for more clues.

[judb]

i suggest renaming ramdisk.sig to something else just in case you need to get it back quickly instead of reloading firmware via PMM..

however mark is spot on with the rest of his statements. go mark!

[Geed]

Thank you for the help guys! It's tough being a noob at this and not finding a specific post that covers your particular situation. I appreciate all the help!

I renamed the ramdisk.sig file and was able to get back a working original DMS.

I then ran a firmware update via Music Manager (the website was back up) and upgraded to 7.02. After that I re-ran the ISO CD hack and followed everything to the letter. I fianlly heard the unlocked message this time. Then I ran into the same problem that Mark had with the aadec.sig file and the MD5 checksum failed error. So I re-ran the 7.02 update on the new DMS and now it works!

Thanks again guys!

[JettaJoe]

I have VW / Phatbox.. Something similar happened to me and I can not figure it out.. Had original DMS the PHTSYS from the PC was unreadable... I formated the disk with phathack tool and tried with PPM to fix drive. I even tried another 20gb drive and ran both. when I plug in my DMS I get the red light then the green light stays on for like 2 seconds goes off and blinks slow 3 times then starts blinking really fast and dose not stop !!! I can not figure it out !! any suggestions