[Andrew] got his hands on a Kingston Wi-Drive, and being the responsible Hackaday reader he is, spent the better part of a weekend figuring out how to get root on this shiny new toy
The Kingston Wi-Drive is a small battery-powered Flash drive with a wi-fi adapter in a small, compact case. Even though Kingston is going after a fairly niche market by advertising the Wi-Drive to expand the storage of iOS and Android devices, a network attached storage solution that can fit in a pocket is somewhat interesting. Unfortunately, Kingston decided to lock down the Wi-Drive; [Andrew] can’t even get a terminal running on this little box.
After a weekend, [Andrew] is no closer to his goal of getting root on the Wi-Drive. He suspects the problem may be there simply isn’t a terminal for Telnet to bind to. [Andrew] realized he was a bit out of his league on this hack and decided to open up his research to people much more experienced in embedded Linux environments. If you’ve been playing around with a Wi-Drive, or you want a tiny battery-powered NAS, send us something on the tip line and we’ll follow up on this post.
I wish these things were more useful. 250gig and can be accessed as a SMB share from a laptop? Great idea. 32 gig for a ipad? what a waste, I’ve already got 64 gig in there, I’m looking to carry a lot more or have a pocket wifi file server so I can have a friend copy all the latest ios’s I found to his laptop.
Anyone know of a larger unit that takes real laptop hard drives and has the wifi part?
Hard drives need to spin up and spin down, and require alot more current to operate than solid state storage devices. Obviously, this unit’s storage circuits should only draw more than a few milliamps of current when it is being accessed, while the mechanical hard disk drive would require current during spin up and access. For a small battery powered device, it wouldn’t make much sense if you wanted to be able to instantaneously access data at will. A standard HDD might work if you are prepared cache the full file(movie or song) you were accessing, but that all seems somewhat inconvenient…
Man doesn’t hack anything. Gets a post about how he did not in fact hack anything. But he is still trying to hack it. He may succeed. But he has not done so yet. But this is still hack worthy. Or something.
I mean, hacking this is cool and I encourage him to do so but err… he hasn’t actually been able to do so yet? Isn’t the format of Hackaday to exhibit and show off actual finished or nearly finished hacks?
Apparently he found out how to run commands on it so he really did hack it. The problem was finding stuff that he could execute.
He actually did something and documented it that is really worth something. I think it was an interesting try, and hope someone can make something more out of it.
I am not saying I am not glad he documented it. It just seems like he still has a lot of work to go yet.
Totally agree. I was super disappointed after reading this article. My brother has one of these and I was hoping I could help save him from his rather unfortunate purchase.
Sounds like he hacked it as well as he could, and I think this post is useful.
Maybe someone has gone further or can go further and they will respond or merge efforts.
Stop whining!!!
This is what we lack everywhere. Documented observations.
Many can do various interesting sh*t but few dare to document it.
+1
Good on him, many hands make light work. By documenting what he has found out it’ll make someone else’s steps easier.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
The Airstash is the original such device, and supports SDHC/SDXC cards instead of having a set amount of storage. Probably easier to hack too, at least it has more features as you can upload files to it from the iPad and other devices instead of just accessing files. There are hrd drives out there too though, seagate has one, goflex satellite
I love how outside companies have to produce products to overcome the shortcomings(features)of Apple products.
Re-moveable storage, no we can’t have that. Why not drag the floppy into the garbage can to eject it, Mac – Think way different.
Stop trolling.
Send one to sprite_tm for 6 hours. It’ll get hacked.
Shouldn’t be too hard actually, sounds like the scripts can be used to copy over both a telnet server and a login shell. If the device was ten euro instead of 50, I’d buy one just for the hell of it.
@Sprite_tm It came out last year, so likely it’ll be heading to the discount warehouse stores soon. The trick is to snag them at the right price before the stock runs out…
i have a rogers mifi one of them novatel wireless 3g/wifi portable hubs. very similar in design. would love a hack t use it as a repeater for my own network. id send it to you but you’d have to guarentee its return. with an affidavit or something guaranteeing it.
Can’t guarantee a return in working condition, sorry. One of the first things I’d do is try to find the serial/jtag-port, which is hardware work and would mean a chance of destroying it. Even if i weren’t to do that, there’s always a chance of writing to the wrong part of flash and overwriting the bootloader, bricking the thing.
The goflex satellite has a terrible stock interface but has a 500GB internal drive, runs for 7 hours, supports wifi pass-through, and runs linux (so you can smb that mofo). Enough people have hacked it that it’s pretty easy and well documented on seagate’s support forum. Probably not worth the $199.99 though…
i was able to get it to almost a webserver but i need help with the part about .shtml something about needing a style script also when it reboots any work save in config is saved compared against the cd filesystem any files extra in config get wiped.
Yeah /config gets wiped everytime you reboot. You can over come this by replace the script on the CD partition. Takes 5 minutes with a hex editor and a copy of the CD Updater.
However, this isn’t necessary as the whole drive is accessible on the web server (I know right!) – so just stick the script on the root of your drive and it’ll work fine 🙂
I think some people didn’t read the whole post (can’t expect that) – but I did get Busybox with telnet on there, but couldn’t get it to work, rather frustratingly.
I’m not sure the JTAG route is even necessary – I backed up the firmware pretty easily, and if I could have mounted the JFFS2 partition, then I could modify and reflash pretty easily without resorting to cracking the thing open. You could also do the actual flash using an .shtml file – so if done, it would be a very very simple firmware hack.
Spode – the author
well looking at his write up, the CPU used is the RTL8196C, and openWRT has a (mostly?) working port, so why not try flashing that to it?
linkage to what i found of the port: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=31551 hope it does someone some good
NAS the genie about to get into your bottle.
This product reminds me of the CloudFTP on kickstarter – http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/125911486/cloudftp-wirelessly-share-any-usb-storage-with-ipa
Would be a nice companion for my kindle fire (mounted in the car)
If it’s running Linux with samba he could use this bug http://www.samba.org/samba/security/CVE-2012-1182 to run his own code.
No Samba.
Send me a device…….
Would it be possible when rooted, to make it work with some other drives, that are larger, like WD Passport series! :S
Wi-Drive Source Code “The GPL allows you to freely copy, modify and redistribute that software”
http://www.kingston.com/us/support/technical/products?model=wid
Am not a good programer , but this may help.
Im just wondering if someone has opened one up yet. Maybe extend the battery and find a way to add more storage. The seagate drive is a lot bigger and a lot more expensive.
get or make an ARM device with a wifi SoC and SD slot.. or even better USB host contol. This thing is way to expensive hence why nobody cares if it is hacked, much like linear purpose gaming consoles..
Yah this thing gets me. dang apache2 server. I just want to make it an web site terminal because it could be considered going green but mainly because some times the thing needs work and uptime is important. Any help or suggestions on how to do would be awesome also you can map the drive is network sorage thats how i accessed it over wifi and played with it also turn it on then let it load up and you can plug it in to the wall adpter and keep it on and running.
A tiny portable WiFi Apache server? Hmm. There have been times when I’ve wanted one of those for event information sites to cover a small location. i.e. a campsite, where lugging even a netbook would be painful.
As I understand, this unit could also act as a relay to extend the coverage of an actual Internet AP. Bonus! (Although an external antenna hack might be useful.)
Even if it can’t be hacked wide open, there could be some interesting re-purposing possible.
Just saying but i really wish someone would crack one open possible the 16gb model. It would help to know whats in it and possibly upgrade the storage? It could have clips around it that hold it tightly.
This thing doesn’t seem overly difficult, although a peep show would be nice so we can check for headers to wire into or flash chips for firmware.