Updating the Hard Drive on your Mindstor Digital Wallet

Did a little project for ArcterDad, upgrading the laptop hard drive in a digital wallet he had from the 2G it came with with a nice new (used) 20G drive. After much digging I found these links:


I found a reference to the first link in a Russian photo newsgroup, found it wasn’t there, so tried in the Internet Archive. The first page involves writing out floppy disk images (what’s a floppy disk daddy?) and doing all sorts of things that seemed like a kludge to get around people not running Linux. The second link seemed more linux-oriented though, and since I had the hard drive plugged into my linux box, it seemed logical.

To prevent it being lost even more I have archived a copy of it. All text and images still (c) the original author of course.

So I first tried the instructions on the ‘oldupgrade’ page and found they didn’t work. At that time I didn’t know that some older firmware versions on the digital wallets wouldn’t recognize disks larger than 8G though, so I went through the last link until I saw the note about the 8 G limit.

I grabbed the upgrade script they had and hacked up my own version which simply grabbed the FW-IMG and SN.IMG files from the current directory and used them and the math magic from the script to calculate where to write the boot image to on the drive.

Long story short, writing it to 8G -16m worked just fine, device is now booting and shows 8G free. Sadly that’s not much these days if you’re going to be taking pics with a 6 or 10mp camera. Better than nothing though!

Fun little project, glad it worked out (mostly).

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Category: Technology