My projects

DMS (Digital Music Server) hacking

This is a DMS that got. I was at a ewaste store and saw something out of the corner of my eye, a rack mounted piece of equipment with linux sticker on the harddrive. Here where my steps to hacking it into running a different os. First I opened up the machine to see what I was dealing with. It seemed to just be a standard socket A system. The weird part is it had 128 mb sdram. The motherboard also only had 1 pci slot and nothing else. The motherboard had an onboard vga board which was not a given back then and not all boards had onboard video. After looking into this for a while I believe that this does ot have onboard video either but it appears to use the cpu for rendering graphics. The pc also had a removable 80gb seagate ide drive. After realizing it was just a pc I tried getting to a boot menu but no matter what button I mashed I could not get to one. I tried both a ps/2 kb and a usb one to no avail. Then I decided to try to change the boot order in the bios but i could not seem to get into it on my sub keyboard so then I pulled out the hdd to force it to ask if I wanted to go to bios and from there I was able to get in using a ps/2 kb. Once I was in the bios I was able to enable usb kb/mice and booting off usb. Then I changed the boot order as well so the MDS would try to boot off my usb drive firs. from there I was able to boot into my ventoy usb. I also have taken a disk image of the entire drive and will post it on my archive page. In the future I want to see what modifications it would take to run windows on the thing as it does not appear to have a gpu. I also want to see its performance as a linux machine. (EDIT: I finnaly got the time to remove the cpu cooler and it turns out that I suck at guessing sockets and also that it was a Intel Celeron 850/128/100/1.75v cpu )