Subject: [E3-hacking] E3 musings

From: "Matt Thorpe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 16:04:41 +0000

Hello!  First mail but I have been lurking for a few months.

My E3 reports the same build numbers as other E3s on this list, and seems to 
only have one PARMS module at flash 00404400.

Have managed to gain shell access on my E3 via the init=/bin/sh method via 
Johnathans pbltool utility and have been taking a nose around the 
filesystem.  A friend and I tried to rebuild its boot sequence from the 
/start_cramfs and /run_delta scripts, and we seem to have managed to get it 
to load it's kernal modules for all it's hardware gubbins, but the amstrad 
software itself seems to be called at the end of run_delta as follows:

exec /bin/sh -c  "\
	while true; \
	do \
	/delta/watchman stnc_sys_boot.elf -r0xB20000,0x1400000 -C /dev/tty1;\
	 done\
	" </dev/console >/dev/console 2>&1

We've tried running this command as is but it always results in an exception 
from watchman (with all registers on the dump reading 0 oddly) followed by a 
swift reboot.  We get the same behaviour running the run_delta script 
directly once we've executed the commands in start_cramfs.

Also, using an SMC 2202USB/ETH usb->ethernet adapter (via the pegasus.c 
driver) we have managed to set an IP address on the E3 and ping it over a 
LAN, however it doesn't seem to have any networking services on it as is so 
it is not a massive help.  We also tried mounting various USB storage 
devices (hard drives and pendrives) but these get picked up and not claimed 
by any driver, and I believe someone said that a few months that they had 
managed this so it would be veyr helpful if they could let me know how as 
we'd like to pull the ELF binaries in /delta off to see if dissasembly helps 
our understanding of the system.

---

From: Jonathan McDowell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 16:08:41 +0000

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 04:04:41PM +0000, Matt Thorpe wrote:
 
> it is not a massive help.

I believe you should be able to mount a remote NFS partition this way;
have you tried this? Certainly /proc/filesystems shows nfs listed for my
E3.

J.

-- 
Revd. Jonathan McDowell, ULC | It does it for me our kid!