Factory Snap Drives were 'Modified'

lagunacomputer · 03-05-2006, 04:33 PM

Quantum took stock drives and used some sort of linux floppy that they had created to 'hard set' some funky bit on the drives so that you can't ghost or copy the partitions easily or something. I don't remember if it was in the controller chip or on mbr or what, but i think it was in a chip on the controller board.

I used to work at the engineering/manufacturing plant in Irvine for 3 years. Although a pc tech, I was knee deep in all the development of the snap drives and dx30's and tape libraries they produced there. Here's the story....

I remember one of the lab engineers telling me about it, and it struck me as strange if not impossible because he said they could some how write to one of the chips on the drive itself to do this. It was get people to buy thier drives or something for replacement, or to keep them from being used outside of the snaps. i dont really remember the method or the exact reason but it was along those lines. i think this is why people have a hard time replicating drives in pc's. I do remember alot of them were 60gb quantum fireball drives that were being made by maxtor. Maybe even a few IBM deskstars 80-120gb. They were going into snap servers and dx30s....all IDE. They would not format or partition in a PC. I tried it myself.

Food for thought.........

blue68f100 · 03-05-2006, 05:18 PM

True, windows can not read or copy the drives. BUT dd on the Knoppix CD can. We use it all the time to copy image files to new hd. I've used it on my raid 1, with no problems and have used it to setup new drives.

We are a well aware of the modified XFS file system. It can and has been done. If you have read through the threads, you would KNOW this. dd uses a sector by sector copy of all tracks include boot, it does not need to know what file system is. There is also other copy programs used for frensic work that also can read these drives, and make perfect copies.

We can not mount the drives to read, but we can duplicate it.

jontz · 03-05-2006, 06:17 PM

True, we are all aware of the modified file system, but still a good story. Thanks for the insight.

re3dyb0y · 03-17-2006, 05:32 AM

You can take snap formatted drives and use them in pc's as pc drives...

I've done it for my brother with my old 80gb...

Or didn't you mean that?

03-05-2006, 04:33 PM	#1
lagunacomputer Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: laguna beach, ca Posts: 8	Factory Snap Drives were 'Modified' Quantum took stock drives and used some sort of linux floppy that they had created to 'hard set' some funky bit on the drives so that you can't ghost or copy the partitions easily or something. I don't remember if it was in the controller chip or on mbr or what, but i think it was in a chip on the controller board. I used to work at the engineering/manufacturing plant in Irvine for 3 years. Although a pc tech, I was knee deep in all the development of the snap drives and dx30's and tape libraries they produced there. Here's the story.... I remember one of the lab engineers telling me about it, and it struck me as strange if not impossible because he said they could some how write to one of the chips on the drive itself to do this. It was get people to buy thier drives or something for replacement, or to keep them from being used outside of the snaps. i dont really remember the method or the exact reason but it was along those lines. i think this is why people have a hard time replicating drives in pc's. I do remember alot of them were 60gb quantum fireball drives that were being made by maxtor. Maybe even a few IBM deskstars 80-120gb. They were going into snap servers and dx30s....all IDE. They would not format or partition in a PC. I tried it myself. Food for thought.........

03-05-2006, 05:18 PM	#2
blue68f100 Thermophile Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Plano, TX Posts: 3,135	Re: Factory Snap Drives were 'Modified' True, windows can not read or copy the drives. BUT dd on the Knoppix CD can. We use it all the time to copy image files to new hd. I've used it on my raid 1, with no problems and have used it to setup new drives. We are a well aware of the modified XFS file system. It can and has been done. If you have read through the threads, you would KNOW this. dd uses a sector by sector copy of all tracks include boot, it does not need to know what file system is. There is also other copy programs used for frensic work that also can read these drives, and make perfect copies. We can not mount the drives to read, but we can duplicate it. __________________ 1 Snap 4500 - 1.0T (4 x 250gig WD2500SB RE), Raid5, 1 Snap 4500 - 1.6T (4 x 400gig Seagates), Raid5, 1 Snap 4200 - 4.0T (4 x 2gig Seagates), Raid5, Using SATA converts from Andy Link to SnapOS FAQ's http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=13820

03-05-2006, 06:17 PM	#3
jontz Cooling Savant Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: South Bend, IN Posts: 385	Re: Factory Snap Drives were 'Modified' True, we are all aware of the modified file system, but still a good story. Thanks for the insight.

03-17-2006, 05:32 AM	#4
re3dyb0y Cooling Savant Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: UK Posts: 909	Re: Factory Snap Drives were 'Modified' You can take snap formatted drives and use them in pc's as pc drives... I've done it for my brother with my old 80gb... Or didn't you mean that? __________________ Snap Server Help Wiki - http://wiki.procooling.com/index.php/Snap_Server Snap Server 2200 v3.4.807 2x 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 w/ UNIDFC601512M Replacement Fan "Did you really think it would be that easy??" Other NAS's 1x NSLU2 w/ 512mb Corsair Flash Voyager Running Unslung 6.8b 1x NSLU2 w/ 8Gb LaCie Carte Orange Running Debian/NSLU2 Stable 4.0r0 250GB LaCie Ethernet Disk Running Windows XP Embedded

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