Copying the drives aren’t the issue, I’m just wondering if there could be potential quirks or incompatibilities with the newer hardware(s).
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^It sounds like these are going to be your biggest concerns with the USB drives.
I’ve done direct duplication from HD to SSD on Windows 7 machines and there should’t be a big problem here. My only concern is that you say these are XP machines, and most XP machines had older Parallel ATA, not SATA connections. If this is the case, you could run into some issues because you will need a SATA controller card to be able to use a sata SSD which of course could be an issue in finding older XP compatible drivers, etc.
Have you checked to see if these older drives are SATA based?
its from 06, its not totally out of the realm since sata was pretty much on most new hardware then but even still theres manufacturers out the making IDE SSDs for things like old CNC machines and whatnot. I’m not sure what the USB drives actually do here. If they act like some kind of key then they likely arent even USB drives.
Oh yeah I forgot about this thread, hang on 2 mins
EDIT: make it 7 mins, I need tools
Well the hard drive, It’s SATA allright so that’s something.
The USB key isn’t a normal USB drive after all, it’s a microcontroller with a battery backup, so I’m guessing I shouldn’t need to worry about it getting corrupted or anything like a storage device, which now brings up the question about the battery… if the battery would be replaced, EEPROM would be erased, maybe? 
But SSDs hitting the market and needed fully functioning drivers took some time. I can remember updating the firmware of my first SSD because it didn’t support TRIMM or SMART or whatever it was. So I’m really skeptical about such things. 
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Allrighty, put my dirty fingers on the machine for the first time, so apparently the USB stick is somekind of a DRM thing, the system boots fine but the game won’t launch if the key is missing.
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sounds about right. USB keys wont die but the battery is what is keeping everything on the microcontroller.
2 options.
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- Solder a connector to it and power it externally to replace the battery.
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- Try to extract whatever data is on the USB. Could we get pics to see if this even possible?
PC wouldn’t register the drive, just checked lsusb and lsblk both came out blank, didn’t check anymore tho
EDIT: I’ll see if I can get any good pics with mah potatoe
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sounds like the special ports are not usb but just using the USB interface for a cheap and easy to use connector.
If its just an EPROM (single E) then youre fine. EEPROMs on the other hand might be corrupted. You could get an EEPROM reader and copy its contents if it is indeed one.
Can’t say which one it is yet, I need to take off the plastics but for that I need an allen key the size of my junk.
When I plug in the usb stick in my laptop and check dmesg, it says ‘Device is not authorized for usage
’, interesting
I’m pretty sure its a USB device but it probably contains code that works in conjunction with the program. Everything on it is likely encrypted in some way.
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Bingo, thanks for the link. Learning something new I enjoy that!
And the research continues… but not today since I’ll focus on drinking beer from now on this evening
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You can also run dmesg in the terminal and see what it outputs before and after plugging the device in. At least to get the micro controller details.
There’s really no details as far as I see
[24480.487025] usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 8 using xhci_hcd
[24480.651710] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=04fa, idProduct=2490
[24480.651718] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
[24480.653227] usb 1-1: Device is not authorized for usage
[root@Y910 ~]#
Vendor and product ID, Googled it but wasn’t on the fist page so I gave up for that moment
Lawl
I understand. Good Luck.
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If it needs to be broken always go for the weakest link, don’t forget we have Windows XP here
also @Baz what is the output of this command?
lsusb -d 04fa:2490 -vv
-d specifies the vendor,product id
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