Hacking Switch NAND layout ...

Escape1975

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Does anyone know what the layout of SYSTEM and USER partitions are?
Specifically what cluster size the FAT32 system uses on both partitions ...
 

Escape1975

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From boot sector (SYSTEM & USER) :
512 bytes per sector
32 reserved sectors
32 sectors per cluster (cluster size: 16 KB)
Number of FAT : 2

Excellent, thanks for the info ...

While looking at USER partition and using HacDiskMount I've noticed that when you re-format it from windows the FAT32 filesystem changes a little bit, and it's no longer considered a FAT32 (BitLocker) because windows adds a boot sector to it ...

Wondering if someone has a USER.BIN backup that they could point me towards so I can examine
the differences and how to handle editing USER and SYSTEM partitions without altering them too much ...
 

eliboa

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Excellent, thanks for the info ...

While looking at USER partition and using HacDiskMount I've noticed that when you re-format it from windows the FAT32 filesystem changes a little bit, and it's no longer considered a FAT32 (BitLocker) because windows adds a boot sector to it ...

Wondering if someone has a USER.BIN backup that they could point me towards so I can examine
the differences and how to handle editing USER and SYSTEM partitions without altering them too much ...
There's always a boot sector in reserved sectors, that's how FAT works. You should try NxNandManager to re-format USER, it'll recreate boot & info sectors with original values (as much as possible).

About your BitLocker tag problem, maybe there's a value somewhere in info sector that describes partition's encryption mode. USER, SYSTEM, SAFE, PRODINFO & PRODINFOF are all encrypted with AES-XTS mode (decryption uses BIS keys), BitLocker uses AES-XTS too, if I remind correctly. I guess that's why Windows labels your partition "BitLocker" even though it's not encrypted with BitLocker.
 
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Escape1975

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There's always a boot sector in reserved sectors, that's how FAT works. You should try NxNandManager to re-format USER, it'll recreate boot & info sectors with original values (as much as possible).

About your BitLocker tag problem, maybe there's a value somewhere in info sector that describes partition's encryption mode. USER, SYSTEM, SAFE, PRODINFO & PRODINFOF are all encrypted with AES-XTS mode (decryption uses BIS keys), BitLocker uses AES-XTS too, if I remind correctly. I guess that's why Windows labels your partition "BitLocker" even though it's not encrypted with BitLocker.

Ok I'll try messing with that, the BitLocker flag shows up in Winhex when I open the SYSTEM image part of the dump,
however it doesn't when I open the USER image part of the dump ...

It looks like the SYSTEM and I'm also assuming USER is formatted differently than my USER is now,
that is I shouldn't see "MSDOS 5.0" and "Press any key to reboot" anywhere on the filesystem :)

Also the SYSTEM boot identifier is EB E9 90 instead of Windows's EB 58 90
 
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