David Wei is a freelance writer of comptuer articles, overclocking maniac, programming beginner, and a general all-round geek.

Blast Back! Send a private message directly to David Wei with your thoughts:

Contact OS/2 e-Zine!

Go to a Printer Friendly version of this page

Summary: Protect your computer with this handy expansion card that not only backs up your OS/2 partitions, but also password protects your whole machine.

The Hacker Card is a neat device from a Taiwanese company called Lenten Tech that helps you implement several hardware based security and protection schemes. It consists of a tiny ISA card with a Flash memory chip, a few accompanying chips and jumpers for you to adjust the Flash ROM's memory address setting. Its simplistic appearance can fool you, but the secret is in the code stored in the Flash memory chip. For what you get, The Hacker Card does an amazing variety of tasks that can either lock down your computer from potential intruders or save your bacon from a corrupted partition.

The package that you get includes the Hacker card, a floppy with a program for updating the card's Flash memory, plus a manual that describes how to install and setup the card to protect your computer's data.

The Functions

The functions of the card are simple: Add partition mirroring capabilities for easy disaster recovery; save your BIOS settings in case they get corrupted; add strong boot-up password protection; and supply a more powerful multi-boot capability. There are a few other features such as hard drive read-only protection and sector-by-sector copying of one physical drive to another, but I was unable to test these for this review.

Partition Mirroring and Disaster Recovery

For the partition mirroring feature, the Hacker Card creates a "twin" partition on your hard drive and makes a sector-by-sector identical copy of the original. The speed of the process depends on how fast your hard drive can work and by the size of the partition, but it will work on IDE, SCSI, or virtually any kind of disk media that your computer can partition.

After the procedure is complete, the mirrored image will stay the same and not change even as the original partition changes, meaning that you should occasionally tell the Hacker Card to re-copy the original partition and keep your backup fresh. When disaster such as a virus attack, faulty program installation, accidental hard drive format or other freak accident occurs, you'll only need to use the Hacker card to restore the image and your system will revert back to normal as if nothing had happened. This makes it the perfect tool for recovering from a nasty FixPak installation fault, for example.

Password Protection

The boot-up password protection feature isn't like any of those I've seen before. Most of the available software-based password protection is achieved by modifying the partition table and only unlocking it after the correct password is given. I've personally cracked this kind of protection in 5 minutes by using a partition recovery tool and telling it to rebuild the partition table; giving me access to anything and everything on the drive. The second kind of protection is a hardware based lock, where it prevents you from doing anything without the password. I defeated that as well by removing the hard drive and using it in another computer. You see, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and when the invader is not playing by the rule of the designer, then the whole protection breaks down.

The Hacker card gets around the above weaknesses in two ways. First, like regular hardware protection, the Hacker Card will not allow the intruder to do anything without the password, but it does not end there. The drive is rendered completely unreadable if you do not have the Hacker Card installed, to the point where no recovery software or even FDISK can figure out if any partitions exist on the drive at all.

Multiple Boot

The multi-boot feature is similar to a Boot Manager setup with only Primary partition for booting and extended logical partitions for shared data area, meaning you can install other operating systems without them interfering with each other.

As a warning, Asus and other Symbios based SCSI card might conflict with the Hacker Card. While the Hacker Card has the memory address used by the onboard ROM clearly documented, the Asus SC875 UWSCSI have absolutely no such information in the documentation. I found that out by chance when I was in the SCSI BIOS setup. So if you have such card installed, you'd better check out the memory address for the SCSI ROM, and record it down on a piece of paper with all the important setting of your computer.

Installation

Installation of the Hacker card is simple; change the jumper settings to avoid the address used by your SCSI card (if any) and shove it into a free ISA slot. Boot up your computer and you'll see the BIOS doing all the work of checking the memory and the drives, while SCSI scans for all the SCSI devices. Nothing changed, eh? Wait a couple more seconds and the program in the Hacker Card jumps to life, asking you to place the update disk into the drive which it uses to update the code in the Hacker card.

Now after the code update, I am prompted to partition the drive into two categories: bootable-and-mirrored, bootable, and non-bootable shared data area. As the test was done on a 1.6GB hard drive, I partitioned the drive into a 500MB bootable-and-mirrored partition (1 gig total) and one 600MB non-bootable shared partition. OS/2 TWarp 4.0 (Taiwanese language edition) and FixPak 4 are installed on the bootable partition. Then Netscape, MR/2 ICE and several other applications are then installed on the shared data drive. With a reboot to activate Hacker Card's program, I order it to do a backup image of the partition's current status. After about 15 minutes, the task is complete and I can boot into OS/2 again. Everything works just as before and nothing different shows up, but I now have a backup of the OS/2 partition.

Well, it is time for some acid test. I reboot again, this time from OS/2's installation disks, and use it to completely format the drive with OS/2 on it. The boot partition has now been completely killed (the HPFS partition overwritten with FAT too), beyond any repair utility's power to recover without a complete backup. I reboot again and note that the computer cannot boot into OS/2 at all anymore. So I select the recover option from the Hacker Card, wait about 15 minutes for the partition to be restored, and boot again into my now working OS/2 partition. Everything has been returned to the pristine shape it was in before.

The Hacker card truly lives up to the advertising slogan: "The computer that just won't die." Nothing replaces a real backup, but with Hacker card you will not need to break out the backup tapes or disks for most of your problems. A snap of the finger is all you need to recover from data corruption, or FixPak installation problems. But the Hacker Card will not help you if your hard drive dies (physical failure), or the data on your non-protected partition gets messed up. A Hacker card is best combined with a good backup system for the ultimate combo of data safety and ease of operation.

I have not tested the read-only protection feature of the Hacker card, for the reason that it will wreck havoc under OS/2 (imagine that OS/2 is now unable to update OS2.ini, SWAPPER.DAT and other essential files.). I was also unable to test the track to track hard-drive copy feature because I could not obtain another of the same drive for testing. The track to track copy feature is useful for "mass" producing hard drives with identical content, including partition setup and more, which would be nice to have if you are setting up a computer classroom or selling computers for a living.

I've tested the Hacker Card on a Western Digital 1.6GB drive and a IBM DDRS-39130UW 9GB UWSCSI drive. Tests show that the Hacker Card has one bug in the calculation, reporting my 9GB hard drive (8.7GB in BIOS) as only a 8GB drive. But this calculation error does not seem to affect the function of the card.

Value: 5 Coexistability: 4 Durability: 4 OS/2 Friendliness: 5 Overall: 4.5

The Hacker Card by Lenten Tech. Ltd., Co. MSRP: US$50 in Taiwan, US availability T.B.A.