Getting into a proprietary box

[AlkiDweller]

Complete newb here. Well..., with Linux anyway.

[Back story. Skip if not interested.]

A couple of years ago I purchased two continuous data protection devices from SonicWall. They monitor two Windows based servers and make live backups, including making incremental copies of open files. They're actually pretty slick. That is, they were until one of them got full and now won't respond. I refuse to pay SonicWall for support when it should have been a simple process to account for the situation in the development of the product. They want their pound of flesh!

[The Problem]

In any event, these things are small PC's with mainboards made by Via (Via VPSD), which I can't find any technical information for. The OS is some flavor of Linux. They have no floppy or CD. They do have USB ports, which are not supported by the BIOS (or that functionality has been disabled in the BIOS) and there is no prompt to get into the BIOS and I've tried all the usual keys, F1, Del, F10, F11, etc.

At boot time I can bypass loading the OS and at the command line, using "root" the only drives/partitions detected are hd0,0, hd0,1 and hd0,2. I'm therefore assuming that the BIOS sees only one drive with three partitions and that a second physical drive and partition (USB if detected) would be hd1,0.

Am I going about this right?

Probably a long shot here, but any suggestions (short of opening it up) on how I might boot another operating system?

I do have CD's and flash drives with three different "Live" boot disks. UBCD, openSUSE and BackTrack.

--
AlkiDweller

[Hal343]

I'm not all that familiar with it, but UBCD, booted from a Windows machine should be able to access the drives in the Sonicwall, & if you can copy the data to another drive, you should be able to delete what's on there & it should work again. Backtrack is more of a security distro, so I'm not sure what other tools it has. SUSE should work, but if you're not familiar with the distro, you would be puzzled on how to use it for that purpose.

[Rubberman]

AFAIK, the Via CPU is an x86 clone. Depending upon the amount of memory they have, you should be able to boot most x86 (32bit) Linux distributions, provided you can get it to boot from USB, or you are ready for some serious hardware hacking. In any case, someone has hacked these, I'm sure. What make/model are they? Also, as much of the system configuration details that you know would be useful. Remember, Google is your friend!

[AlkiDweller]

AFAIK, the Via CPU is an x86 clone. Depending upon the amount of memory they have, you should be able to boot most x86 (32bit) Linux distributions, provided you can get it to boot from USB, or you are ready for some serious hardware hacking. In any case, someone has hacked these, I'm sure. What make/model are they? Also, as much of the system configuration details that you know would be useful. Remember, Google is your friend!

No information about the system configuration. It's not sold as a PC. It's sold (and manufactured by) SonicWall as a backup device (model 1440i). I only learned that's it's a regular PC running Linux at the forums at SonicWall. Hence, my visit here.

If I can't get into it without really getting into it, I'll put its hard drive into something else and attack it from that angle. If I for some reason I can't delete some of the data on its drive and get it working again I'll wipe the whole thing and turn it into the most expensive DVR you've ever seen.

--
Jordon

[Rubberman]

Here is an interesting link I found for hacking the 1440i: YouTube - Hacking a SonicWall 1440i

[AlkiDweller]

Here is an interesting link I found for hacking the 1440i: [removed URL because it won't let AlkiDweller post it] YouTube - Hacking a SonicWall 1440i

In-freakin-credible! For one thing, I tried DEL to get into the BIOS, along with every other common key that I know of. When I saw that video (and I'm only a couple minutes into it now), I tried it again and just kept banging on the delete key. Presto, I'm in to the BIOS. I feel like an idiot now.

For another thing, I figured that the SonicWall CDP was such an obscure thing, it never dawned on me that someone would document how to get around the exact same problem I have, let alone put it on YouTube. It certainly isn't in the SonicWall CDP forums (but I wouldn't doubt it if it was and removed by SonicWall).

Thank you Mr. Rubberman!

[Rubberman]

Kewl! Glad you got it figured out. Now you can do something about the problem without paying "ransome" to SonicWall!