{"id":58,"date":"2008-03-28T21:32:52","date_gmt":"2008-03-29T02:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=58"},"modified":"2023-11-24T14:07:27","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T18:07:27","slug":"mysterious-amd-usb-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2008\/mysterious-amd-usb-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious AMD USB drive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ken.walker.name\">Ken<\/a> went to EclipseCon and all he brought me back was this lousy USB drive..<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"100_4817.JPG\" href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/100_4817.JPG\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/100_4817.JPG\" alt=\"100_4817.JPG\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Actually, I had seen Ian&#8217;s post <a href=\"http:\/\/ianskerrett.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/17\/eclipsecon-guide-to-free-stuff\/\">EclipseCon Guide to Free Stuff<\/a> and asked Ken to grab me one.<\/p>\n<p>As expected, there were a bunch of AMD promotional .pdf files on the device.\u00a0 I&#8217;m interested in reading through it at one point, but I also think a &#8216;free&#8217; 1Gig USB drive is pretty handy.\u00a0 The drive shows up with 2 partitions, one is 20MB with the promotional material on it &#8211; read-only, and the other is a read\/write partition with the remainder of the Gig.<\/p>\n<p>Now maybe there is something I just don&#8217;t know about flash drives, but I&#8217;m not able to convince Windows or Linux to reformat this thing to remove the 20MB read only partition.\u00a0 If anyone out there knows the magic, please add a comment with the solution.<\/p>\n<p>I got to thinking maybe it was a hardware hack.\u00a0 So of course, I busted it open.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"100_4820.JPG\" href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/100_4820.JPG\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/100_4820.JPG\" alt=\"100_4820.JPG\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"100_4824.JPG\" href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/100_4824.JPG\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/100_4824.JPG\" alt=\"100_4824.JPG\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The flip side is a very generic looking 1Gig flash chip.\u00a0 The controller chip is by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chipsbank.com\/company_e.asp\">ChipBank<\/a>, a CBM2090.\u00a0 There are some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chipsbank.com\/products_e2.asp\">data sheets<\/a> available for it, but nothing that really tells me much.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m actually starting to get the feeling that this is a clever firmware hack.\u00a0 If I had access to the right software, I could reach in and tweak the system to &#8216;fix&#8217; the read only flag and reformat to my liking.\u00a0 So far, no luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ken went to EclipseCon and all he brought me back was this lousy USB drive.. Actually, I had seen Ian&#8217;s post EclipseCon Guide to Free Stuff and asked Ken to grab me one. As expected, there were a bunch of AMD promotional .pdf files on the device.\u00a0 I&#8217;m interested in reading through it at one &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2008\/mysterious-amd-usb-drive\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Mysterious AMD USB drive&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2246,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/2246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}