Cloning your Snap 1000 HD is now Possible and Doable in less time

[danz]

Hi all,

This is the PART I of my snap adventure.

i also owned a snap 1000 server, and just like all of you, i wanted to increase the size of my 10gb to at least 40gb, i read all the thread here and it seems that most of you guys tried everything to increase the capacity of the drive but to no success, anyways, i also tried to do the same thing and finally i made some progress and i wanted to share that experience to all of you. before i continue explaining the steps of achieving it, a littlte disclaimer first, i will not take any responsibility or liability if you destroy your snap server, you will be on your own, and i don't guarantee that the procedure that i have done will work on your machine, it is up to you (reader) if you want to continue the steps that i will post on this thread. without any further ado, let's get started.

lucky me, i have two snap 1000 server and i only use one, i reserved the other one incase i need more space, i use my spare to experiment increasing the capacity of my drive, but before i commit suicide on my snap1000, i made few observations and analysis of the drive itself, some of the things that i need to know, are listed as follows.

Q1. Is the snap1000 HD is different from other HD? is it a custom made specifically for snap1000 only?
Q2. Is the HD in the snap1000 a modified one? is it designed only for the snap1000 or can it be use on a common pc?
Q3. What partition the snap1000 uses?
Q4. What OS the snap uses?

These are the basic question i have for now, and i will explain it to you one-by-one, and more questions and analysis will follow but first i have to answer or get an idea to these questions.

Answer to Q1.
With the first question, the answer is, NO, snap1000 HD is not different from other HD, it is not a custom built HD, i found this when i installed it on my machine and the BIOS recognize it, i even fdisk it to see if DOS can recognise the disk and format it i even install windows 98 on it, and well, it does work afterall, you heard me right i fdisk the snap1000 HD, and of course you would ask, how did i do that, i will explain that later, and hopefully you will understand more about it. right now we are only interested about the characteristic of the drive itself.

Answer Q2
i guess this is a redundant question, but anyway, the answer to this is NO again, i just managed to install it on my common pc. So obviously, the snap1000 hd is not designed to run on the snap1000 only.

Answer Q3
DOS can only recognised few type of partitions, FAT/16/32 and the rest is NON-DOS FAT which could be an NTFS or a linux partition and some other type of foreign partition, when i use DOS to boot my machine, and use fdisk to see if there is a partition, the DOS reported that there is no partition created, in other words, none of the partition that i mentioned above the snap1000 uses, it seems that the snap1000 might have a partition that DOS can recognise as NON-DOS but it could be hidden, of your course you can actually hide the partition if you want especially if you use other OS such as redhat, FreeBSD or any non-dos utility, i once seen that option, "Hidding the partition" when i am installing my redhat 7.1 during creating a partition table, so i guess snap1000 is using a non-dos (obviuosly) but it could be hidden. but until now that is only a guess since i can not figure out the partition it uses. And since that DOS cannot report the type of its partition, any HD clonning software such NORTON GHOST,HDcopy,DriveImage or anything like that will not work, bear in mind that these software are designed to recognise few partition (i.e. FAT/16/32,NTFS, etc.) provided that those partition is not hidden, but in this case there is a partition in the snap1000 HD but hidden and cannot be found. These softwares are DOS based product, so these will only recognise partition that DOS can recognise.

Answer Q4
I don't have any clue, but looking at the "Server Log" of the snap1000, the way it was written is somewhat *nix. so i guess it could be a custom Linux or FreeBSD, i even tried to use an OS fingerprinting utilily to find out the OS but since only few TCP port is opened and some of them won't give a reply, the fingerprinting utils cannot give me a better identification. by the way, snap1000 uses its firmware to boot itself but there are some files in the HD is needed to boot it completely. i noticed this, when after booting the snap1000 i remove the HD while the snap1000 is running (this is my kamikaze style, don't do this if you are not prepared to destroy your snap.), then from the other machine i pinged it and so far it gives me a reply without the HD, this is expected since the TCP stack is in the memory. i also noticed it when i upgraded its firmware during the upload, i saw a HEX file, and while storing the HEX file to my snap i don't see the HD is doing some writting, so i guess the destination of that HEX file is the firmware. and the rest of the uploads destination was in the HD.

Continued..... end of Part I

Next Part (Cloning your Snap 1000 HD is now Possible and Doable in less time)

Author

Dan Santillan
CompTIA A+, Net+ certified
PCTek.Technologies.

[re3dyb0y]

So wheres part 2?