The beginning of the first partition is moved forward on the disk a small amount from where it would normally be created. It's perfectly valid to do this, it's just not normally done, why waste the space. But, that small extra space is where, what seems to be the key, is stored. On my 10gig DMS, the key seems to start around absolute sector 1792, and the start of the first partition is at absolute sector 2048. This is why if you repartition the DMS you'll most likely destroy the key, as the partitioning software will move the beginning of the first partition to the more normal beginnning of the disk, overwriting the key.
As I mentioned on the "other" board, my next experiment is to manually resize the PHTSYS partition to something like 35MB (from 260). Then add the extra space to the PHTDTA partition for more music. If this works, then we can almost certainly eliminate any partition information being stored in the key.
sulaco, we need coders like you here! Excellent to have you aboard. I'm more of a hardware guy. But with coders and hardware people coming at this from different directions, I'm sure we can solve it.
I'm wondering if you know what boot.pac and boot5.pac are? Are these files the actually boot firmware stored in the Phatbox?