hons.un-excogitate.org

PDD Day 2

This is the writeup for my continued analysis of PDD (see PDD Day 1 here for the first part).

First step, to perform 2 successful acquisitions - one immediately after the other - hopefully the only changes to the palm will be pdd's automatic soft-reset, a re-alignment of the stylus and the input of the [(shortcut) . . 2] to enable console mode.

Attempting to perform 2 acquisitions one after the other, minimising activity on the palm in between - Process - 040801 11.44am

Placed the palm on the cradle, turned on the device, and ensured that "Stay on in Cradle" was still enabled.

Opened up a cmd.exe terminal, and changed to the "pdd" directory.

Executed: pdd of=040801.out

The terminal then reported:

Enter console debug mode [<shortcut> .. 2]

I then input the command into the palm, the terminal then reported:

pdd process beginning.

This first attempt failed, the terminal reporting a:

CRC-16 Checksum invalid.

Because this did not occur in between the 2 acquisition tests, we restarted the test, outputing to 040801-2.out. This test ran successfully:

Resetting Palm OS device.

pdd successful. Exiting.

After the palm reset - i realigned the stylus, and then executed "pdd of=040801-3.out" on the desktop, which required me once again to put the palm into console mode:

Enter console debug mode [<shortcut> .. 2]

pdd process beginning.

This 3rd test ran successfully:

Resetting Palm OS device.

pdd successful. Exiting.

These two final tests then had been performed successfully, one after the other, with a minimal amount of interference between each one:

• PDD's automatic soft-reset of the device
• Re-aligning of the stylus
• Putting the palm into console mode

The two files, 040801-2.out 040801-3.out are compared below:

040801-2.out ; size = 8,388,608 bytes ; md5 = f79b6c2a2038d967d8b6de6f1165955c

040801-3.out ; size = 8,388,608 bytes ; md5 = fd9f99ae611f0528fb18be30005479af

Once again, like the first round of tests, these 2 images have been modified in between the 2 acquisitions, even though none of the actual data entries have been modified (the contacts or memos or calendar etc) the process of the soft-reset, the realignment of the stylus, and the entering into console mode has changed the image slightly.

Performing an acquisition of the ROM from the palm - Process - 040801 3pm

This was another test of the pdd application, to successfully download the ROM image of the palm device (not the RAM image, which is what i've been doing up until now) - with this ROM image, it should be possible to load up a Palm Emulator on the desktop with this ROM to make a logical palm on the computer, with the exact same OS as that on the device itself (though without any of the data on the palm - as this is in the RAM image, not the ROM image)

With the palm and the desktop still connected, in a cmd.exe the following was executed

pdd of=040801rom.out type=ROM

This required the re-entering of the console mode:

Enter console debug mode [<shortcut> .. 2]

pdd process beginning.

This completed successfully:

Resetting Palm OS device.

pdd successful. Exiting.

After installing the Palm OS Emulator version 3.5, i executed it on the desktop and loaded the 040801rom.out file successfully. view screengrab