Ulta Low Level Hard Drive Access:

[Erich Keane]

Ok, first a quick background: I, along with a small group of diehards
came up with a way to disable the EU volume cap protection on the
european ipods. Unfortunately, this way never caught on, as it is a
VERY difficult process for people used to apple products to handle.
Now, to solve the problem, and possibly make it more mainstream, i
would like to create a C++ (or java, altho i hate the language, i also
know a little about it) application to accomplish the task for the
user.

Herein lies the problem, i cannot for the life of me find any API or
class file that will allow me to accomplish the specific tasks
required. I believe it would require Very Very low level hard drive
access, and some way to determine which drive is the ipod on everyones
computer (ipod is treated as a standard Hard Disk by linux, only as an
SDA device, if that helps), and accomplish the following processes
(first on the win 2k/xp platform, then possibly on the osx platform):
1) Completely repartition a hard drive, including hidden partitions.
The way the ipod is set up, there is 3 partitions, only 1 of which is
viewable to the OS.
AS read in osx

#: type name length base ( size
)
1: Apple_partition_map partition map 62 @ 1
2: Apple_MDFW firmware 81920 @ 63 (
40.0M)
3: Apple_HFS* disk 29215536 @ 81983 (
13.9G**)
Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=29215536
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

*can also be FAT32 for windows formatted ipods
** Can be anywhere from 10G(advertisers gb, not a real one, the 13.9
is supposedly a 15gb) worth, to now 40G worth.

The 3rd partition is unimportant at the moment, only the first 2.
2) Write back a firmware image onto the MDFW partition from a binary
file previously captured. EAsy enough.

Basically, what needs to be done is the MDFW partition needs to be
resized from 32 mb to 40mb and a new firmware file written back to it.

If anyone has any information whatsoever on something that you think
will help me with my task, i would be very gratefull.

Thank you all,
Erich Keane

 

[David White]

[snip]

This is a long way from a C++ question. What you need is the relevant
hardware or OS information, and once you get it you can write your code in
any sufficiently capable language. This newsgroup is for _standard_ C++, so
your question is off-topic here.

DW

 

[Christian Gollwitzer]

1) Completely repartition a hard drive, including hidden partitions.
The way the ipod is set up, there is 3 partitions, only 1 of which is
viewable to the OS.
AS read in osx

#: type name length base ( size
)
1: Apple_partition_map partition map 62 @ 1
2: Apple_MDFW firmware 81920 @ 63 (
40.0M)
3: Apple_HFS* disk 29215536 @ 81983 (
13.9G**)
Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=29215536
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

*can also be FAT32 for windows formatted ipods
** Can be anywhere from 10G(advertisers gb, not a real one, the 13.9
is supposedly a 15gb) worth, to now 40G worth.

The 3rd partition is unimportant at the moment, only the first 2.
2) Write back a firmware image onto the MDFW partition from a binary
file previously captured. EAsy enough.

Basically, what needs to be done is the MDFW partition needs to be
resized from 32 mb to 40mb and a new firmware file written back to it.

Although being Off-Topic here, it can be done on Linux within a
shell-script, since you state the drive works the standard drivers (usb-
mass storage, I suppose). So you can use the sfdisk program from a
shellscript to create the new partition table, and then dd or cat or
simple redirect from gzip to write the image. No problem with that.
Creating an empty filesystem (="formatting") can be done using standard
mkfs command. Since OSX has BSD kernel and UNIX-Tools installed, it
should be possible to write similar program for OSX.

BTW: Do you know about the legal consequences of what you are planning
to do?