Damn, another hurdle for hacking my old Digicard system, which is sitting in my bedroom serving to my IIgs. The drive image does not work when raw-copied to another drive of a different size. So anyway I am currently in the process of trying to reverse-engineer the darn thing. All I want is to store games on it, but I feel it'd be prudent to back up the original hard drive data and do the gaming on a second hard drive, but alas the Digicard won't boot off the second drive, which was created by using Ghost to raw-copy the original drive. The second drive IS a bigger than the original, so that may be the problem, though I don't see why the Digicard should care, since the logical partition data is still all the same. So anyway I have so far hacked the password, doing some nice sector probing with Norton Disk Editor. If you're interested, the password table on a Digicard drive is in sector 352 and it is all plaintext -- just look for the word SYSTEM and it'll be followed a few bytes later by the password. I have also found a way to gain access to the hidden /MANDRAKE system directory, which the Digicard normally fiercely hides from everybody.. From poking around, it appears that Digicard volumes must follow logical boundaries, so the total space available on the 700 meg drive is really only about 400 megs, with the rest apparantly unused. Yet using Norton Disk Editor on my original drive is showing data on the drive all the way up to the final sector. Either there was prior data on the drive before it was used as a Digicard drive, or this is some weird "end of drive" data used by the Digicard. I am considering snooping the SCSI bus to see what the heck the Digicard server is trying to do when it boots. Is it hunting for code in the last sectors of the drive? Such stupidity certainly appears possible, because for the most part drive formatting is not something a school admin is supposed to be able to do. The DigiCard is really more of a "turnkey" setup where somebody ELSE sets it up and you are handed the working result. Any repairs appears to assume you automatically call your "handler" to fix it for you (for big bucks too, I guess). There is no drive formatter on the drive itself. Formatting and general setup may in fact require a separate system, probably unix since there's a sticker on my drive which mentions "dd-copying". It looks like this is geared for "paid service" whenever any sort of maintenance is necessary. You can't normally even get write access to the /MANDRAKE system directory directly. I suppose I may have to reverse engineer the drive partition tables. Fortunately this may turn out to be a very easy job, since I have the Digicard Tech Tools which check the drive and partition tables for "inconsistencies". Such tools must themselves know how the drive data is laid out, so they hold the keys to the drive configuration. Also, there is the "sector test/fix" tool, which is a BASIC program that does raw SCSI read/write to the drive. This may be additionally useful for figuring out how the Digicard accesses data on the drive.. Likely more to come. ;-) Interesting text fragments from the drive in question: Sector 7 GhostWhoLogsIn Sector 8 Knock knock. Who's there? Joe sent me. OK, come in. Sector 11 PG.spike A2.EMAIL MAIL.LIST Sector 88 D-Net version 2.05, Copyright 1988 Sector 112 RPS Mod V2.00 Sector 116 RDS Mod V1.00 Sector 610 (looks like volume structure starts here, including that all-important Mandrake system directory. so everything prior must be Digicard/System/Reserved.) MANDRAKE MAND.OVL.20 DOS.VOL1.IMG PRODOS OVLAY.OBJ SHELL.OBJ MESS.OBJ MAND.OVL.1 MAND.OVL.10 MAND.OVL.11 MAND.OVL.12 MAND.OVL.13 MAND.OVL.14 Sector 611 MAND.OVL.6B MAND.OVL.6C PRODOS.BOOT PASCAL.BOOT PRODOS.FILES LOADER.SYSTEM MAND.OVL.02 MAND.OVL.03 MAND.OVL.21 MAND.OVL.22 MAND.OVL.23 MAND.OVL.24 MAND.OVL.25 Sector 612 MAND.OVL.27 MAND.OVL.30 MAND.OVL.31 MAND.OVL.32 MAND.OVL.33 MAND.OVL.40 MAND.OVL.41 MAND.OVL.42 MAND.OVL.43 MAND.OVL.50 MAND.OVL.51 MAND.OVL.52 MAND.OVL.53 Sector 613 MAND.OVL.54 MAND.OVL.55 MAND.OVL.56 MAND.OVL.57 MAND.OVL.60 MAND.OVL.61 MAND.OVL.62 MAND.OVL.68 MAND.OVL.69 MAND.OVL.6A MAND.OVL.80 SELECTOR.OBJ MAND.OVL.5A Sector 696 SYSTEM.SRC#SYSTEM -Mr. Boffo Email: mister_boffo@hotmail.com On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:55:26 -0600, Dennis Jenkins wrote: >What is this device? > >"Mr. Boffo" wrote: >> >> Damn, another hurdle for hacking my old Digicard system, which is >> sitting in my bedroom serving to my IIgs. The drive image does not >> work when raw-copied to another drive of a different size. It's an antique file server for the Apple II, Mac, and PCs. It has a custom-designed motherboard and operating system, serving up files from a SCSI hard drive to the Appletalk-compatible "PhoneNet" cabling or to an Ethernet-compatible network. It can support up to 96 simultaneous users, and apparantly can handle up to a 13 gig SCSI hard drive. The Mandrake network management software lets you set up different access for different users, so there can be many more ProDOS volumes on the thing than an Apple II could normally support just by having different login names to access all the various volumes. My primary interest is that unlike the Apple SCSI card, this thing also supports plain old DOS 3.3 on the network. It can even serve up Apple CP/M and Pascal software on the network. So it is far and above more capable than just having an Apple SCSI card and ProDOS.. Apple II/IIgs usage requires a specially-designed "D-Net" network card to connect to the PhoneNet cabling. Mac usage typically involves special INITs to find the server on the PhoneNet cabling. With the addition of a slot 1 jumper card, the D-Net card can reroute printing from each networked Apple II to a single "classroom network printer".. Although the cabling is AppleTalk compatible, the Digicard doesn't speak Appletalk, hence the special network card for a IIgs and drivers for the Mac, both of which have Appletalk support builtin. Tech support for this thing does actually still exist, but the company in question usually deals with large institutions and "bills them accordingly". It does not discount for "invidual hobbyists" such as myself. I do not care to blow a grand for a bigger hard drive (yep, it'd cost a thousand bucks to get a $150 SCSI drive formatted and set up), so instead I'm seeing if I can do it myself. (At that price I might as well use this thing as a doorstop and suffer along with just ProDOS on an Apple SCSI card.) -Mr. Boffo Email: mister_boffo@hotmail.com