WANTED: Hard drive "image" from 80GB Original DMS.

[grymster]

WANTED: Hard drive "image" from 80GB Original DMS ( without songs ).
And I think that I also need HDD Serial Number

[judb]

what do you plan on using that for exactly? 

[grymster]

2 judb

I want to clone DMS.
Maybe it's impossible, but i want to try

Or You can try to convince me that it's impossible.

[S80_UK]

It is impossible to clone a DMS unless you know how to clone the serial number that is stored in the hard drive firmware. 

It is better and simpler to use an original DMS to hack your boxes (one DMS can be used multiple times to hack boxes).  Then you can make new DMS's with bigger hard disks.  If you don't have an original DMS, buy or borrow one.  Old 10Gig or 20Gig DMS's can be had relatively cheaply and if you want you can sell it on when you're done.

[judb]

I'll just tell you it wont work.  You can try it anyhow if you think you are smarter than everyone else and then come back here looking for the correct answer later, or just do it how we suggest and save yourself time.  I don't have to convince you.

[RuslanRVD]

It is impossible to clone a DMS unless you know how to clone the serial number that is stored in the hard drive firmware. 

It is better and simpler to use an original DMS to hack your boxes (one DMS can be used multiple times to hack boxes).  Then you can make new DMS's with bigger hard disks.  If you don't have an original DMS, buy or borrow one.  Old 10Gig or 20Gig DMS's can be had relatively cheaply and if you want you can sell it on when you're done.

I'm not an expert in hard drives, so I may be wrong. May be somebody can tell me more about it.
I thought that retrieve physical HDD serial number (written on HDD label) is not easy.
And only manufacturers utilities can do it by using special interrupts (specific to the manufacturer).
That's why many softwares using only "Volume ID" from Hard Drive which stored in boot record and can be changed easily.

I don't know yet how DMS signing their hard drives.
I just looked inside my 20Gb DMS hard drive.
It's made by Toshiba.
Looks like they use not standard partitioning.
Hardware shows 16heads and 63sectors per cylinder, but in their partition it's 64heads and 32sectors per cylinder.
Then they have 2048 sectors offset till first partition boot record (normally it's 63).   
Only last 256 sectors before 1st boot record filled with some compressed data (probably booting kernel for box).
Vol ID on 1st boot record is 3E7D5D6A, and on second it's 3E7D5D6D. Partition Signature is AA550000.
Can somebody share their IDs?

So my question is:
If I duplicate all this on other hard drive, is it theoretically possible to use it without hacking the Box?
How Box separates "Good" DMS from "Bad"?
Obviously Box cannot store all possible physical serial numbers of all hard drives in DMS.
And it's not possible to use same physical serial number in DMS hard drives too.

It's just for my curiosity. I agree, that your way is much faster.

Thank you,
RuslanRVD

[judb]

no that will not work.  it uses the actual drive serial number, not the volume id.

The bootloader, which is what is in flash memory on the phatbox (that never gets updated by phatnoise, their firmware updates only update the 8052 micro controller code so it can talk to the head unit).  The boot loader uses the drive serial number and RSA public / private key cryptography to verify that the drive has a signature on it between the master boot record and the beginning of the first partition which is offset by 1 megabyte from the start of the drive.

the signature has been created using the drive serial number as one of the important features of the signature and only works for that specific drive with that serial number.

We modify the flash where the boot loader is stored to change the boot loader to think the signature is correct even if it doesn't exist.  There's other things we modify in there but that is the real important part to using a non phatnoise drive.

[sbingner]

Getting the drive serial number and model number is part of the ATA standard.