All for access

Hey, check out this:












No, this isn't a bomb- its a "password retrieval" tool. Or at least, it should be, when I'm done.

More info later- I just had to upload these picutures cause they look so darn cool!

UPDATE:

To paraphrase NASA- "Dude, we have success!"

I feel very sneaky indeed. Look at this thing:









And a close up for the geeks (hi Anders!):










Here it is installed:
SO...Let me give all the non-tech readers a chance to log off now. Y'all gone? Ok.

You see, like I mentioned in earlier posts, I got a Toshiba laptop that had a busted up screen and a bios password stuck. Normally, you can just reset the password by taking the battery out. They must have hid a battery somewhere on this thing though, and if you look online apparently Toshibas have more security features then most- in fact, some of them will encrypt the hard drive with the password in the bios. Pretty crazy, eh?

So anyways, I got this one from a client. I don't think he even know what the password was, it probably was set by the IT team at his work. After the battery didn't work, I did some research and found out there was a 'back-door' for password retrival: short a bunch of pins on the printer port. I told my dad about it and he said "Sure, you can just whack one of our extra cables up." But then he found this crazy connector you see (sans the wires; I added those myself) and said I could use it. Dude, its like a parrallel port breadboard! Only problem was that pin one didn't have a little plug, but my dad tinned it up and sodered a wire to for me in a snap. I stripped a bunch of telephone wire and made the connections- actually I way overdid the wire. I realized that half way through I only needed one wire per connection- duh! I was putting a wire in each whole then twisting them together. I only needed to do this for the first one though, because it had three pins together instead of 2. Live and learn, you know.

Here's a really crummy quality picture of me and my winnings:

Its not the photographer's fault BTW, just a crummy camera.

Uhh.. the END!

So this is what they call "Blogging"

(Sorry Becca: This post will probably mostly bore you! You have been warned... )

So.. cool last couple of days. I've totally been geeking out over here at the lab. At first I felt overwhelemed because I hadn't done much PC work recently then suddenly I had two computers that were overdue 'in the shop' so to speak. One of them was from a client I never worked with before, and I'm always nervous to make a good impression. But it all turned out good in the end. I fixed his laptop- and as part of my payment, I got his old laptop.

It's Toshiba Tecra 8100. 700Mhz, not bad, and a DVD drive. Through a kind of long process that I don't want to go into, it also now has a 60 gb hard drive. Only big problem is the screen is shattered. I originally figured I'd hackjob (read:duct tape) a lcd screen on to it, but when I got home, I realized something: My dad's old laptop that stopped booting was a tecra 8000- the model right below mine. I looked it up and the screens seem to have the same specs... so. This week I will attempt a transplant. :D

I got the idea sort of after another awesome geek thing I did this week. My dad's programming friend pulled two 160GB hard drives out of a dumpster at his work. One of them spun up but seemed to have deep media problems, the other one had physically burned out- you can see the place where the chip smoked the board.

So- me and my dad have often speculated that if we needed to recover data off of a drive who's controller board (the little ciruit board on the hard drive) got blown by static disharge or whatever, you could probably swap the controller board from one that worked and it would work out. There are a few problems, we figured, with this idea: low level formatting writes bad areas of the disk to the card allegedly, and that would be different for each disk. But, I tried it anyway.

I removed the screws so lovingly placed there by the cheap overseas labor and carefully removed the ribbon cable (making sure not to repeat my performance of the xbox incident, where I broke the connector clamp). I swapped out the boards, screwed it back in, and fired it up on a test box (no way was I giving the drive a chance to fry my power). And... hey! Whats this? XP? 2000? Its right there- apparently what the company had on it originally! So... 160 GB of space. Thats alot. I don't know if its mine yet though; the programmer handed me the drives and said "see if you can fix these". He might want it for the startup we were working on still... we shall see.

So. Its been good.There are other things too, like agape starting up again which is just so much fun- I love all my new friends over there! Homeschoolers are cool like that- most of them have this vibe about them that just clicks with you, like you have known them your whole life. I love it. Good stories, but, guess what? Its 2:06! So thats it for this post!



----Zeke

"Twilight is gonna' get your head right."