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Home / Other I-Appliances / MSN Companion Format of msn companion upgrade data? Format of msn companion upgrade data?

Format of msn companion upgrade data? (modified 0 times) Rasmus Profile | Email If you fake out the MSN web server you can download the 10M file that the IA downloads when you Ctrl-U three times. It is trivial to do. If you want to grab this data, go here: http://php2.chek.com/~rasmus/msn.php The question is, what format is this in? Being 10M instead of 16 and based on the content it isn't just a raw image. Some sort of simple compression? I don't recognize it from the beginning of the file. Anybody know? When trying to upgrade to MSN2 via the phone line the progress bar keeps stopping at about 90% complete telling me the data is corrupted and that I need to try again. Quite annoying. Would be nice if I could just stick this 10M file on it directly somehow. 12-23-2001 06:37:14

RE:Format of msn companion upgrade data? (modified 0 times) keith721 Profile my guess: like everything else Compaq/M$ did with the IA-1/MSN, it's an archive of .BIN files. since WinCE embeds the file system within the NK.BIN 'executable', the update file can probably be loaded at some location in memory, and analyzed. any chance you can loopback mount the file in Linux, using a UMSDOS or VFAT filesystem? the original WinCE partitions on the internal SanDisk were either FAT-12 or FAT-16, so this might be possible. just thinking out loud . . . keith721 12-23-2001 08:10:21

RE:Format of msn companion upgrade data? (modified 0 times) Rasmus Profile | Email I tried loopback mounting it as both vfat and msdos and neither worked. Looking at the actual content it really does look compressed, but I don't recognize the compression mechanism. 12-23-2001 10:26:08

RE:Format of msn companion upgrade data? (modified 0 times) sin613 Profile i already posted about this. running a simple "file" command on the clientman file yields that at least the start of the file is believed to be a PCX image. sooo, i'm guessing that the file is in some easy-to-understand sequence like this: PCX image for startup logo BIOS upgrade? nk.bin file demo.swf demo1.swf demo2.swf demo3.swf (these files exist in v2.0) and then the contents of the other folders... i think one of them was "HRUN" and the other was "USERS" or something like that. the sandisk image is easily mountable in linux, you can even use it as a hard drive image (given the correct geometry) in bochs (bochs.sourceforge.net), albeit an image you can't boot from. i've done a little reading into how various bootloaders work with WinCE, it's very unlikely that the ipaq or any other WinCE device uses loadcepc as it's a *very* slow bootloader compared to others, plus it requires DOS whereas other bootloaders just require a fat-12/16/32 FS and they will automatically seek the nk.bin file. sin613 12-27-2001 01:29:23

RE:Format of msn companion upgrade data? (modified 0 times) sin613 Profile oh yeah, and if you look through the clientman file using a hex editor, a *lot* of the data is recurring, so i think that should rule out even a simple LZH compression scheme. i'm willing to bet it's not compressed at all, but rather a series of files appended to eachother. sin613 12-27-2001 01:30:56

RE:Format of msn companion upgrade data? (modified 0 times) mkraai Profile Any progress here? This might be a way around the unhackable BIOS. Load jailbait this way, then maybe a BIOS flash utility to load a hackable BIOS image? How about a prog for jailbait to load an MSN failsafe image? BTW, I haven't tried to hack mine (yet), because it was a gift for my MIL(mother-in-law). If she picks up on the concepts well, I might try hacking it to save the $10/month, but she's so happy with it, and her learning curve's so long that I may not want to. 01-04-2002 15:22:59

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