Mark,
Thanks for your help. Just trying to organize my posts to this thread...
Here is what I have done so far:
Using Hack CD, I tried the patch and failed, try try again. Finally heard the unlock message.
finished the process with the hack CD on the new HDD, but it didn't work in the box.
tried the dd command, still didn't work
changed the rc pairs, no help. Box would not boot with new HDD at all.
Tried downloading the firmware and unzipping, deleting forceupdate. still nothing
I even formatted the original DMS, and unzipped the firmware into it, and reinitialized it with PMM, and tried the hack CD again.
The original DMS still worked, so I used it for a while.
Had to do some work on the car, and disconnected the battery. After recoding the Head Unit, I had to reattach the phatbox cable with the Original DMS.
This worked, so I was still using the original DMS.
I decided to try the process again with the hack CD.
On running the hack CD, it opens to the repair screen. Instead of inserting the DMS when prompted, I hit enter, then inserted the DMS, which examined it for errors on the repair screen. Found bad partitions with unrecoverable errors. It listed the partitions as No Name & PHTDATA. I ran a full repair. This is what damaged the DMS, I believe. I just wasn't paying atention to what I was doing.
All that was needed was to corrupt the ramdisk.sig file as said before. If I can get the Headunit and box talking again, I think I will be able to complete the patch, and use the new HDD. I found a local to help me out.
My question is, since the patch was never completed with the corrupted ramdisk.sig file, is it possible that what I've done so far is no longer on the box? that it is no longer unlocked, partially?
another question, does the ramdisk.sig file need to be corrupted on each new HDD? if i were to have more than one.