Howdy guys. Got the VW/Audi Phatbox myself. Ran the patching, the drive switching, etc...
my issue with the new 60gb drive is that it does take a while for it to finally read and start.
Welcome! There are several things I wanted to reply to in your post, but I won't quote the whole thing here...
I have a 60 gig drive now in my PhatBox, and haven't noticed any slowdown as compared to the original 20 gig drive (VW Jetta unit). When I turn the car on, I will commonly have 10 seconds (ish) where the radio is on and waiting for the PhatBox to boot up, but I've accepted that as normal. The behavior you've encountered sounds like a hardware problem, perhaps.
What are the red/green LEDs doing while it tries (unsuccessfully) to boot?
You could gain a *ton* of insight into what's going on when it tries to boot by looking at the logfile it creates as 'logfile.txt' on the PHTSYS partition. I don't remember if it will always create it; in any case, to get more info, what you should do is install one of the rc.sh files from here:
http://downloads.phathack.com/bushing/rc_pairs.zip.
Those are alternate versions of the rc.sh file it uses while booting; the only real difference is that they set an environmental variable that increases the level of logging. We go these because one of our members, firefox, went digging through all of the PhatNoise firmware releases for all of the cars out there, and found a couple "testing" scripts that they had let slip. (Including the rc.sig signature file, which you'll need too!)
If it does not even boot far enough to start phatd to begin logging, then play around with the bootload.log file:
http://wiki.phathack.com/Bootloader_FAQ***
To Jud + Terry,
I'm a little confused about what's going on with the drives that aren't taking the upgrade properly -- mine being one of them! I used our linux cd to automatically do the upgrade and copy stuff from my VW Jetta 20gig DMS to a 60 gig Travelstar drive; when I tried to boot the PhatBox with it (as my flash was already patched, of course
), I got the 11-blink error from the bootloader, and nothing in the bootload.log. My understanding of that part of the bootloader code is a little murky, but I believe that it is a result of some sanity checks it does on the FAT failing. (Error 11 is the last LED error message -- everything later is written to bootload.log).
I played around with the drive for a while -- using dd to copy the first meg or so from the good drive to the bad didn't work, but copying the first *200* megs did -- of course, I then had to repartition (using a partitionmagic clone) to get at the full 60 gigs. I noticed 2 differences when I was messing around with it:
* Boot CD creates a 64MB PHTSYS partition, while my DMS had a 200-someodd MB partition
* The directory entries on PHTSYS (tts/ etc) took up more space on my "real" DMS (4096 bytes in the output of 'ls'), versus like 512-1024 on the 60 gig (at that point not working). That may be something as little as the larger PHTSYS partition making the FAT code use bigger sectors -- if that's the case, maybe all you need to do is make that PHTSYS partition bigger.
As far as copying the signatures over -- I don't get this. As far as I can tell, NOTHING AT ALL on the phatbox looks at the drive signature (the 512 bytes before partition 1) other than the bootloader, which we're patching, and perhaps aadec, which may or may not care; unclear. (And if aadec does check, it will mismatch against the drive's real ID now, anyway...)
The other weird encrypted data before the first partition is totally ignored by all of the PhatBox, as far as I can tell. Maybe it's used by some of their other products?
Anyway, after copying over the first 200mb of my 20g DMS to the 60g drive, it worked -- I spent a couple hours fixing the partitions, and I'm good to go, although unfortunately I'm still not sure what caused it or what fixed it, or if it's even the same problem other are encountering. (If you'd like, I can play around with "breaking" my 60g fake-DMS to troubleshoot...)
-b
