author=Paul
2. When phatd runs, the first thing it does is to verify the current identify string against the signature on the magic sector. If it differs, phatd exits. Since it is in a while/forever loop, that causes the repetitive green light flashes on the PhatBox.
4. The .pac files are firmware for the microcontroller that interacts with the head unit (that controller needs to be "instant-on" so the head unit doesn't declare the CD changer broken at startup). The rest of the PhatBox boots Linux from the DMS. If a file named forceupdate is present in PHTSYS, the firmware file(s) will be flashed to the microcontroller at next boot.
Hope that helps. It is all (to the best of my knowledge) true.
From my toying around with the boxes I think this is slightly incorrect.
From what I can tell the ramdisk sig is checked before the ramdisk is loaded which means the boot loader checks the sigs on the drives in the phatsys partition. I feel its likley that whatever does this also checks the magic number on the drives during boot up.
The ramdisk /etc/init.d/rcS script calls a mount -a (which only mounts the /dos (phatsys) partition and then calls /dos/rc.sh which then mounts the /dos/Data (phatdata) partition.
The .pac files I think are the firmware for the ARM CPU and the .bif is the file for the microcontroler, i THINK . progpld is a CPLD firmware writer.
Just my thoughts / updates for things as I get more data.