[E3-hacking] Getting the E3 Working again

[Nick Griffin]

Who owns the wiki page at https://wiki.earth.li/E3 would it be ok if I up dated it, I have up dated the Emailer and Amstrad Pages on Wikipedia and added Jonathans McDowell comment from his’s website about the hardware, and what it is, if you look at it now its a lot bigger now,I explain about how it deactivates after 3 months and about the Configuration Change. I might be adding more soon.I have found out a lot more, been taking to Cliff, and that file I found (delta_e_live.config) is the file that it downloads to keep it(a live)activated, it keeps it working, it gets deleted after the time runs out and deactivates the emailer, they all work the same, they all need that file to function that why it has e and live in its name, emailer live and the more it downloaded the file the more time is added to the emailer,3 months was added each time it downloaded the file, so if can’t connect to the server(Amserve) but it connects to the server twice in the same day the Emailer would be a live for 6 months(if you never connected it for 6 months it would stay live for that time),mine lasted 3 months so it connected once before it was turned off, my E3 was last used in 2006 online until last year when I got it from eBay and started to use it all the time, I use it for looking at the time and making calls.

The only way to keep the E3 Emailer activated is to flash a copy of the firmware that has been registered and activated for 3 months or more or has the configuration change on but that would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, they are very rare, so when it deactivates(runs out of time) flash it again, its would be like a snapshot of the emailers state.

You can’t activate E1,E2 or E3 that are deactivated because the technology don’t existed anymore that added time to them and would activated them, you need the Amserve server to do it, You would have to make a HTTP server and get the Emailer to connect to it and fool it into thinking its connected to Amserve and it would need to download the delta_e_live.config(Emailer Live Configuration file) but would need the same PI address (http://212.225.36.174) that points to the Emailer Live file because the PI is hard coded into the emaler so you can’t change it.so the server would have to have that IP address and login and password to Amserve too for it to work.

The Way forward would be the Amstrad Installer Script and see how it dumps the Amstrad E3 Emailer firmware into 6 files and reverse engineer it so it flashes the Amstrad Firmware back to the E3,it hacks it because it should not be able to do it Because Amstrad didn’t want there hardware used this way. But all Linux based devices get hacked.

the Amstrad Installer Script is a Bash script and use about 22 lines to nand dump the Nand flash from the E3 to the USB Stick in the back of the E3.

Looks like dev/mtd has 6 partitions :0,1,2,3,4,5 (mtd0,mtd1,mtd2 and so on)so each partition would be part of the system.

When it flash's Linux to the E3 it only uses partitions mtd0,mtd1,mtd3 and mtd4, so mtd2 and mtd3 is not used.

If this could be worked out then this would get your E3 working again, you would need a working E3 emailer as the donor system.

I have copied the Amstrad Install script on here so if you want to look at it to see if you help,you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.

Spanner
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#!/bin/sh

if (! grep -q /dev/sda1 /proc/mounts); then
 echo "No install media mounted; couldn't find /dev/sda in /proc/mounts"
 exit 1;
fi

echo Do you wish to backup your existing E3 NAND? If you say yes then 6
echo "e3-nand-backup.<n> files will be written containing the current contents"
echo of your flash.
echo -n "[y/N]: "

read i
if [ "x$i" = "xy" -o "x$i" = "xY" ]; then
 echo Backing up NAND. Be patient - this can take a few hours.
 for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5; do
  echo "   mtd$i"
  nanddump -f /media/sda1/e3-nand-backup.$i /dev/mtd$i
 done
else
 echo Skipping NAND backup.
fi

echo

echo "Ready to install. This process will completely wipe your E3's NAND."
echo The Amstrad firmware will no longer exist on the device. Are you
echo -n "sure you wish to continue? [y/N]: "

read i

if [ ! "x$i" = "xy" -a ! "x$i" = "xY" ]; then
 echo
 echo Aborting.
 exit 1
fi

echo
echo Starting install.

if [ -e /media/sda1/uImage ]; then
 echo Found a kernel.
 echo "  Erasing /dev/mtd0"
 flash_eraseall /dev/mtd0
 echo "  Writing kernel to /dev/mtd0"
 nandwrite -p /dev/mtd0 /media/sda1/uImage
fi

if [ -e /media/sda1/u-boot.bin ]; then
 echo Found u-boot.bin
 echo "  Erasing /dev/mtd1"
 flash_eraseall /dev/mtd1
 echo "  Writing u-boot to /dev/mtd1"
 nandwrite -p /dev/mtd1 /media/sda1/u-boot.bin
fi

if [ -e /media/sda1/ldr.img ]; then
 echo Found ldr.img
 echo "  Erasing /dev/mtd3"
 flash_eraseall /dev/mtd3
 echo "  Writing ldr.img to /dev/mtd3"
 dd if=/media/sda1/ldr.img of=/dev/mtdblock3
fi

if [ -e /media/sda1/root.tar.gz ]; then
 echo Found root tarball.
 echo "  Erasing /dev/mtd4 and formatting as jffs2"
 flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtd4
 echo "  Mounting /dev/mtdblock4"
 mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock4 /media/realroot
 if (! grep -q /dev/mtdblock4 /proc/mounts); then
  echo "Failed to format and mount /dev/mtdblock4. Aborting."
  exit 1
 fi
 echo "  Untarring root tarball onto mtd4"
 tar -zxvf /media/sda1/root.tar.gz -C /media/realroot
 echo "  Unmounting /dev/mtdblock4"
 umount /media/realroot
fi

echo "Done."

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