iPod Classic and iPod Nano 3G, 4G

[GodEater]

No, it means that only one partition is exposed.  If you could open your iPod and connect the disk to a native controller you might get a different result (or you might not).

And unless someone does that, we don't know the answer to the question :

Is the firmware for these versions stored in a separate (perhaps hidden?) partition like the earlier iPods and the Sansas?

[boxerorange]

My guess would be that from my "fdisk -l"...scan(?) there's only one partition on my Classic.

No, it means that only one partition is exposed.  If you could open your iPod and connect the disk to a native controller you might get a different result (or you might not).

pondlife

The partition exposed is 159.8gb, which leaves ~204mb left for Apple's Firmware. I'm guessing that would be plenty of space, considering that Rockbox (for 5g/5.5g) is under 10mb.

What do you mean by "connect to a native controller"? Actually connect the hard drive to a PC?

[sexenox]

The partition exposed is 159.8gb, which leaves ~204mb left for Apple's Firmware. I'm guessing that would be plenty of space, considering that Rockbox (for 5g/5.5g) is under 10mb.

I'm not quite sure if this difference in size is caused by the 1000\1024^3 Bytes calculating problem? Or would the values differ even more in this case?

[boxerorange]

The partition exposed is 159.8gb, which leaves ~204mb left for Apple's Firmware. I'm guessing that would be plenty of space, considering that Rockbox (for 5g/5.5g) is under 10mb.

I'm not quite sure if this difference in size is caused by the 1000\1024^3 Bytes calculating problem? Or would the values differ even more in this case?

how would that make any difference?

[saratoga]

Instead of speculating, someone should check what the actual drive capacity is in bytes.

[boxerorange]

Units = cylinders of 1300 * 4096 = 5324800 bytes

Done.

[sexenox]

how would that make any difference?

Manufacturer says his HDD has 160GB; but calculated with 1000^3 Bytes = 1GB.

Program on computer calculates correctly with 1024^3 Bytes = 1GB
-> 160 GB [Manufacturer] ~ 149GB [Computer].

So forget about it. The difference is far beyond 204MB 

[boxerorange]

Why would Apple make it larger than 204MB? That's plenty of space for their firmware, what else could be stored here?

[Llorean]

Suspend image. At least that's one theory. Firstly, their firmware is quite large on the players we're familiar with, but the fact that the 64MB RAM players have a larger firmware partition than the 32MB RAM ones suggests that it's probably there so they can hibernate the RAM of the player to disk when it goes into deep sleep or such. It's also probably a good deal of reserved space for future ideas (for example, when the iPod+Nike came out, that installed a chunk of data to the hidden partition as a resource image for the Nike hardware).

[GodEater]

Given that the iPod Touch is functionally almost identical to the iPhone (which I own and therefore feel somewhat qualified to speak about), I can say that on the Touch at least the "firmware" is actually a cut down version of OSX, which runs at a great deal more disk space than the firmwares from previous iPods.

I've read in a few places that the Classic is also running something similar to this cut down version of OSX (though unfortnately I can't cite the places I saw it as I forget, and it was pretty vague there anyway).

This would likely mean that the firmware partition will be significantly larger than in previous iterations of the iPod.

Certainly on the iPhone the "System" partition where most of the OS lives is around 300MB.

[mirreke]

Hi all,

I would like to help in unravelling the mysteries of the 3rd gen ipod, to make it possible to run rockbox on it. I'm not good with soldering irons, but could do some c programming

I investigated a bit on what is on my ipod (after I filled it with music using libgpod and gtkpod on debian linux).

Fdisk partition info has been posted before.

I find the different physical/logical partition beginnings/endings weird, but this may be caused by the device being solid state storage, and not a physical spinning disk with heads and cylinders and sectors.

I did a "find ." on the mounted partition, and found the same folders that were posted before. The "Calendars", "Contacts",  and "Recordings" folders are empty,  "Photos" just contains an empty subdirectory "Thumbs", and "Notes" contains a 14 byte file Instructions containing the string "<INSTRUCTIONS>" without line terminator.

The "iPod_Control" folder contains the data:

droef:/mnt/ipod# ls -l iPod_Control/
total 32
drwxr-xr-x  2 mirjam mirjam 4096 2008-03-12 22:24 Artwork
drwxr-xr-x  2 mirjam mirjam 4096 2008-05-17 14:35 Device
drwxr-xr-x  3 mirjam mirjam 4096 2007-12-01 22:01 gamedata_RW
drwxr-xr-x  4 mirjam mirjam 4096 2007-11-29 21:34 Games_RO
drwxr-xr-x  3 mirjam mirjam 4096 2007-12-01 22:01 gamestats_WO
drwxr-xr-x  2 mirjam mirjam 4096 2008-05-10 15:49 iTunes
drwxr-xr-x 16 mirjam mirjam 4096 2007-11-29 21:33 Music
drwxr-xr-x  2 mirjam mirjam 4096 2000-02-22 01:30 Tones

iPod_Control/Music contains 13 subdirs, which contain .mp3 files.

iPod_Control/Device seems interesting:
droef:/mnt/ipod# ls -l iPod_Control/Device/
total 36
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam     8 2008-04-28 22:42 alarms
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam    32 2000-02-22 01:30 clock
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam    84 2007-12-14 19:47 PlayCounts
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam  2952 2000-02-22 01:30 Preferences
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam    50 2008-03-30 14:37 SysInfo
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam 11081 2008-05-17 14:35 SysInfoExtended
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mirjam mirjam   107 2007-12-01 22:01 Users

droef:/mnt/ipod# file iPod_Control/Device/*
iPod_Control/Device/alarms:          shell archive or script for antique kernel text
iPod_Control/Device/clock:           data
iPod_Control/Device/PlayCounts:      data
iPod_Control/Device/Preferences:     data
iPod_Control/Device/SysInfo:         ASCII text
iPod_Control/Device/SysInfoExtended: XML
iPod_Control/Device/Users:           data

droef:/mnt/ipod# cat iPod_Control/Device/SysInfo
ModelNumStr: xA980
FirewireGuid: 000A27001A80AAE1

I put up the XML data file for download at:
http://koos.idefix.net/~mirjam/SysInfoExtended

Hope this helps....

[atomikpunk]

Well from what I've read, no one actually knows what's under the hood of the encrypted OF, so until someone somewhere is able to extract the internal ROM content, or otherwise crack the encryption, no one will be able to do anything...

Nonetheless, you can count me in too for I've a 3rd gen. nano. I'm good at software/hardware understanding/disassembling, embedded systems and software development... For those interested, here is a link to the linux4nano group who are putting efforts into breaking that encryption for another project (ipodlinux in fact). If you can contribute, please talk to them. If you can't, please don't bother them

[GodEater]

Well have *you* contacted them and got a dump of the ROM they extracted ?

[atomikpunk]

Hi again,

yes I have contacted them but what they have in the moment is a dump of the external flash, which is actually encrypted using the algorithm (almost certainly) present in the internal SoC ROM. I've got it here (the flash, not the internal ROM) and I can ask them if they mind me sharing it. But obviously, one can't do much with the encrypted firmware until someone somewhere finds the encryption key to be able to decrypt the firmware.

So if anyone here is an electronic expert that could help extract internal ROM content from a SoC, please, oh please get in touch with them

[atomikpunk]

Well on the linux4nano site linuxstb is referring to, there are some documentation, mail archives and stuff. I've gone through most of it and apparently, RC4 was their first hypothesis but from what I understand, it was discarded after some encryption analysis... Have at look at this report for more details.

It seems that until someone somewhere with enough knowledge (and talent) is able to tap himself on the processor chip and get the content of its internal ROM (JTAG, hardware programming protocol or something else), we are stuck...

Owh and by the way, why not stick with this thread instead of starting a new one every now and then