Cosmic Gecko said:

I'm thinking the problem is more along the lines of the cluster size and root-directory size used when restoring the partition images.

Pulp_Fiction may have gotten lucky with a conservative FAT32 formatting scheme; while the others (unknowingly) had their partitioning software use larger clusters to accomodate the larger partition sizes requested.

Well, Pulp send me his drive which he had got working in his Z1. Pulled it right out of his, and I put it in mine and no luck. Froze up. So my next test is to use his partitions that he created and load my files from my original drive. Maybe it has something to do with custom files on the hard drive with each unit as well. Maybe Pulp's Z1 is really special.

That is not good news.....

03Aviator said:

That is not good news.....

No, it's not. The next thing is that it could be 2 things.

1. My original test was using a Hitachi Hard drive, and that was an image of my drive. Lockups.

2. Using my Hitachi Hard drive and loading on pulp's image. Lockups.

3. Using pulp's Fujitsu drive and his drive image. Lockups.

There is one more thing. This I have yet to try.

4. Use pulp's hard drive but load my image on it. Will that work?

I don't hold much faith on it. It's possible that the hard drive image is "customized" for each unit. It could also be a little choosy with the make and model of hard drive used. Maybe it didn't like my hitachi travelstar, maybe it didn't like pulp's image files.

If this #4 doesn't work, I might be out of ideas.

SemoTech said:

My bad, reading in order of activity and did not get the FAQ you made till after replying to this.

Questions:

1. Have you tried to enlarge the MSV FAT32 Partition beyond the 32GB limit? Did it work?

2. Is it possible that the reason Ducatiboy's HD is crashing is due to the way locking and unlocking is handled? I've seen a lot of drives that do not support locking features causing some grief. While I see that you recomend disabling the security features, maybe it is worth a shot not to and let the Z1 happily lock and unlock the drive...

3. How large is the compressed image (Ghost or Acronis) of the original drive you made?

Thanks.

1. yes the larger than 32GB partion works but only for me so far since the others crash.
2. Ducati has the actual drive I was using and is still getting the crashing. Perhaps his Z1 is looking for the ability to lock the drive and getting angry. I'm not ready to lock another drive yet so I'm not going to try this one.
3. About 8.5 gig. Used Ghost.

ducatiboy said:

Well, Pulp send me his drive which he had got working in his Z1. Pulled it right out of his, and I put it in mine and no luck. Froze up. So my next test is to use his partitions that he created and load my files from my original drive. Maybe it has something to do with custom files on the hard drive with each unit as well. Maybe Pulp's Z1 is really special.

Bummer that Pulp didn't send you his drive with a virgin image, but then again, nothing beats actually testing the unit before delivery. :-) I agree with your assessment -- it sounds like custom files or signature files exist after a Z1 boots up with the drive.

Is your own drive image from a virgin, new-in-box hard drive, or did you take the image after the Z1 signed the disc and changed the ATA passwords? (Sorry, I've got several months' worth of posts to catch up on here..)

Cosmic Gecko said:

Bummer that Pulp didn't send you his drive with a virgin image, but then again, nothing beats actually testing the unit before delivery. :-) I agree with your assessment -- it sounds like custom files or signature files exist after a Z1 boots up with the drive.

Is your own drive image from a virgin, new-in-box hard drive, or did you take the image after the Z1 signed the disc and changed the ATA passwords? (Sorry, I've got several months' worth of posts to catch up on here..)

I think most of us have images which are not "virgin". Mine was used for a month before I pulled the drive out and started playing.

I don't know how long Pulp had his drive working before he pulled it and made an image of it, but I'm guessing his wasn't virgin either. His has worked fine. Mine has not. His unit also has lots of hand writing all over the internals with a sharpie or something. I haven't had the guts to rip mine out so I don't know if mine has them or not, but he might have a test or engineering unit or something.

Weird that mine keeps failing and locking up and his never does. I guess I'll load my files on his drive and test it out. Then if that doesn't work, I'll load my files on his drive and send it back to him and he can test my image in his z1. Unfortunately I'll bet my Z1 won't work and his will even with my image. Which means it might be something special with his Z1. Either that or I buy another AUTOMOTIVE laptop drive and image my stock on to that one and try the same exact make and model of drive but an image. And see if that works in mine. My stock drive works great!

'Good to know, thanks! Aside from my powering up the Z1 once to unlock and lower the screen to get access to the HD door, my drive is still untouched. (I dunno how Jake managed to get his HD out of the unit without supplying power.. oh well!)

I'm hoping to sniff out the master password with a logic analyzer so I don't have to molest it further from that password unlocking service.. and if that doesn't work out, I'll just go ahead and have the password clobbered like everyone else. :-)

After that, I should be able to compare the virgin base image against a used image to figure out if any signatures are written.. though that's still a secondary goal -- I'm more interested in identifying the changes to Catalog files so we can figure out how to make the Z1 to "see" any music files dropped into the appropriate directories.

I'm not entirely convinced that AC3 is the only possible format we can store on the drive -- more likely, it's just the default format the Z1 uses to rip cds. MP3s are probably a "forbidden" format to rip to because of licensing and royalty issues.

I just looked at my new imaged drive (after removing from the Z1)

There's somethin funny going on here...

It seems to be using a TFAT filesystem rather than regular FAT32... The MSV partition was renamed to TFAT

Looking into this now!

BigFloppy said:

I just looked at my new imaged drive (after removing from the Z1)

There's somethin funny going on here...

It seems to be using a TFAT filesystem rather than regular FAT32... The MSV partition was renamed to TFAT

Looking into this now!

Now that's interesting! I wonder if there was a running change?

Hm... was that TFAT partition based on an image taken before, or after the Gracenote Update CD was used?

hey guys

do you guys think this could be altered to physically copy files to the drive? not that it helps us much right now, as people who got the drives unlocked havent been able to ge their units to play mp3's. but its a start for people who dont unlock their drioves.

Anything's possible with sufficient time and determination. :-)

The Gracenote update image is a good starting point for reference.

Hopefully the update image files aren't cryptographically signed -- in which case, any developer with the right tools and target-hardware profile can write custom apps for the Z1.

That's the point where I'm trying to get to, once the hardware-locking and password issues are out of the way. :-)

Cosmic Gecko said:

'Good to know, thanks! Aside from my powering up the Z1 once to unlock and lower the screen to get access to the HD door, my drive is still untouched. (I dunno how Jake managed to get his HD out of the unit without supplying power.. oh well!)

IIRC, there is a way to manually lower the door by spinning a wheel from an access hole in the case. I'm sure I read that here somewhere....

Been working on the day job quite a bit lately and I'm playing catch up.

Gracenote update sounds interesting. I want to get and "look" but not install it.

Once I get the drive back I can post if it works in my Z1 with Ducati's files.

03Aviator said:

IIRC, there is a way to manually lower the door by spinning a wheel from an access hole in the case. I'm sure I read that here somewhere....

Yeah, 'saw the half moon slot, and tried turning that gear, but I couldn't get it to move with an amount of force I was comfortable with. I was unable to identify any sort of manual unlock, either. 'Must be well hidden. :-(

Pulp_Fiction said:

Been working on the day job quite a bit lately and I'm playing catch up.

Gracenote update sounds interesting. I want to get and "look" but not install it.

Once I get the drive back I can post if it works in my Z1 with Ducati's files.

Sorry, I haven't loaded them yet, been working on the day job as well. I will load the files this weekend and try my files on your drive in my Z1 and then send the drive to you so you can try my files in your Z1 as well. Sorry it was taking me longer than I thought.

Any progress with this?

The test that we really need to do is to wipe an original drive and copy over it with backed up data.

We already know the "good" replacement drive from Pulp doesn't work for Ducati so we need to find out if the Z1 is looking at the drive model or something.

I'm almost tempted to buy a replacement drive of the exact same model as the OEM drive to see if that has anything to do with it but I really don't need a $130 30GB drive.

Some thoughts I had while doing some research on Windows Automotive and Win CE.Net 4.0 (and 4.2.0):

First, the process of getting a platform up involves setting up the hardware, and creating a bootloader.

This lets you boot on your own hardware for debugging.

From purusing the exe's, it looks like the flash storage (where the boot loader partition resides) is accessed via USB.

Here's my idea. This thing is running CE.NET binaries for main applications. Someone needs to write a very simple CE.NET application (with all of the libraries linked in so it's a standalone app that doesn't rely on anything), and all that app does is copy from the USB/ parition all the files it finds into another folder on the hard drive.

Place that app in place of navi.exe or one of the others, and boot the system. Instead of running the z1 app, it'll run this custom app, copy everything off of the flash partition, at which point (once we figure out an easy way to keep the drives unlocked), we can pull it off and see what it is/replace it, etc.

Thoughts?
-Craig

Its close to bedtime here so had to skim through. I read that people were considering using a modded xbox to unlock the drive.

I don't know if anyone happened to find a modded xbox but I happen to have one.

So if anyone is near Ohio and willing to work with that then there is an option.

Sorry if I'm too late on this one.

-Litos

Ducati,

Not sure if it'll help the HDD testing or not, but I noticed you now have 2 Z1's at the time. Could you try swapping the HDD's and see if they work?

jkawar said:

Ducati,

Not sure if it'll help the HDD testing or not, but I noticed you now have 2 Z1's at the time. Could you try swapping the HDD's and see if they work?

Yah, I plan on trying that sometime.

Has any one been able to make a duplicate of the drive and have that one play.

This would let us know we can at least access the data correctly.

If so how to do it.
I would love to try.

I just at this time want to clone to another drive.
And have that one play

grather said:

Has any one been able to make a duplicate of the drive and have that one play.

This would let us know we can at least access the data correctly.

If so how to do it.
I would love to try.

I just at this time want to clone to another drive.
And have that one play

Pulp Fiction was the only one. His worked fine. In my Z1 it locked up. I think there was another guy here and his locked up too, I don't remember who. I think it was Cirbirus.

ducatiboy said:

Pulp Fiction was the only one. His worked fine. In my Z1 it locked up. I think there was another guy here and his locked up too, I don't remember who. I think it was Cirbirus.

C'mon Steve... there's only 1 of me!

BigFloppy said:

C'mon Steve... there's only 1 of me!

Sorry, all this work on the bypasses got me tired and frustraded. I was working on my truck testing the new 07/06 bypass till 1am last night.