Wii U kiosk Ubuntu box

Discussion in 'Rare and Obscure Gaming' started by koko, Aug 25, 2017.

  1. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    I posted this on Nintendoage trying to find some info about it with no luck, not quite sure where to post this so here it goes. I recently aquired a Wii U kiosk, it had a silver box inside that looks like a small computer. I have posted pics below, it boots up into an ubuntu screen. All I could find online were 5 year old posts showing the same screen at a couple of Ebgames in Canada, right when these kiosks came out. There was speculation the Wii U inside the kiosk was a dummy, and these little boxes initially were running the video previews. Has anyone seen this before, is there way to try and unlock it without wiping it out, is this just a paperweight now. Hoping to find some info, even if it`s just a link someone has come across.
     

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  2. rso

    rso Gone. See y'all elsewhere, maybe.

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    > is there way to try and unlock it without wiping it out
    Does it stay on "insert usb key", or do you eventually get a login prompt? If it's the latter, you can move whatever drive it's booting from to another PC, mount it, and replace the hashes in /etc/shadow* with ones you know the corresponding password for. Reinstall drive, login, done. (Or, don't even bother with the shadow file and just go looking for videos right after the mounting step.)

    * for example, like this:
    root:$6$QYOfx4UAKI/zfv$nnvPw0Ipyytr91Fr2Qb582TpsfOEVw44j4phu1pnvz63VaUH.lpxE8hpk2z/t7wI1CnSicKckn.r9XWbDxJ/i0:17403::::::
    The underlined part - enclosed by colons - is the hash that needs replacing; the password for this one is 'ni'.
     
    Last edited: Aug 25, 2017
  3. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    It only says insert usb key, would that suggest there was one specific usb stick that needed to plug in to unlock it. If thats the case, knowing nothing about ubuntu, would it somehow still be possible to unlock it. It would be pretty cool to preserve it, if it really was the first type of Wii U demo in the unit. The console that is currently in there is a functional Cat unit, but having both would be cool if the box is indeed what the internet suggests it is.
     
  4. rso

    rso Gone. See y'all elsewhere, maybe.

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    You could still try to look around (and/or make a backup of) the boot drive's contents - at least as long as that usb key isn't used for drive encryption... Should be either a CF card or SATA drive in there, going by this.
     
  5. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    Ok I'll try opening it this weekend. I was hoping there was a way to possibly preserve whatever interface might have existed if this really was used in the first wave of kiosks before the functioning demo unit was installed. From what I've read from old posts there was a demo of rayman and a bunch of preview videos with an interface on the touch screen. It apparently hooked right up, which makes sense as there was a loose USB and hdmi cable dangling on the shelves when I opened it. Plugging the USB cable into all of the ports got the red light blinking for a second but otherwise did nothing.
     
  6. ItsMeMario

    ItsMeMario Gutsy Member

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    So, the Rayman demo actually could be played on ubuntu ? @_@
     
  7. koko

    koko Rising Member

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  8. Bad_Ad84

    Bad_Ad84 The Tick

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    Image the hdd, post it up here and we can look at it in a vm.

    Use clonezilla to image the drive
     
  9. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    I`ll try to take it apart tonight or tomorrow, then look into that. Maybe someone can figure out how to unlock it and if there`s anything useful on it, or if its just trash.

    Update: Success, had some time. It was a pain to get into, but it looks like a laptop HDD. I dont have a HDD caddy, can this be plugged into a standard pc. The size is 320gb, that is pretty beefy for the time this was made and has me curious what could be on it that needs that storage.
     

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    Last edited: Aug 26, 2017
  10. Bad_Ad84

    Bad_Ad84 The Tick

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    Yes, if its sata it can be connected to a pc as per any sata drive
     
  11. rso

    rso Gone. See y'all elsewhere, maybe.

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    > can this be plugged into a standard pc
    Yup. Windows most likely would not show it as a "drive" (because Linux partitions), but Clonezilla should work. So, it's 320 gigs? That's more than I would've expected. Hopefully you have an old HDD somewhere, because CZ might need to reformat the target drive to something it understands (i.e. not NTFS) to be able to store the image.
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2017
  12. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    You are correct sir, it didnt show as a drive when I plugged it in. I burnt clonezilla, restarted and went in. I had no idea what to press or do lol that looks a little out of my comfort zone. I was somewhat paranoid of messing my comp up with that, is there a more user friendly program to use. Is there any program that would allow windows to make an image of the drive so I could upload or make a torrent of the drive.
     
  13. rso

    rso Gone. See y'all elsewhere, maybe.

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    Can't help you with Windows tools, but... you can temporarily disconnect all drives apart from the kiosk and target ones (well, and the optical one if you're not booting from USB), that way you're definitely not gonna mess up your computer.
    Just, whatever you end up using, pay attention don't clone/restore anything to the kiosk drive (that of course applies to all imaging tools, Windows or not).
     
  14. Bad_Ad84

    Bad_Ad84 The Tick

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    Ghost is windows and will allow a total copy of the drive (ignoring partitions etc) if you use the correct switches. The issue is, you will end up with a large image as all blank space is imaged too. If its empty, it will compress well. But it could have deleted data there.
     
  15. rso

    rso Gone. See y'all elsewhere, maybe.

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    Same "issue" with CloneZilla, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, copying everything is exaclty what you want if you do a partition- (as opposed to file-)level backup, isn't it?
     
  16. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    Well after making a boot usb stick, this is the newest screen it shows before asking for the usb key heh
     

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  17. Bad_Ad84

    Bad_Ad84 The Tick

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    No, most copy just the used data. This is why you can expand and shrink partitions when applying the image to a different disk.

    Window doesn't support Linux files stems, so it's the only way to image Linux with Windows. Clonezilla I didnt use much, but I'm pretty sure it worked the same way (unless you intentional select the image all option) in the few times I have used it.

    I used to work in deployment for quite a few years.
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2017
  18. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    Stupid question, but when you say ghost, you mean norton ghost. Is there a free version.
     
  19. rso

    rso Gone. See y'all elsewhere, maybe.

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    These days it's branded "Symantec", and no, no freebies.

    How did you come up with a "boot usb stick" - what did you put on there to make it (presumably) boot further? Or is that just a screen you hadn't shown before?
     
  20. koko

    koko Rising Member

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    I followed some directions after downloading an ubuntu boot guide and image. It may just be a matter of the box reading the stick so showing the screen for a couple of seconds while it reads, I havent seen that screen before, although maybe it just flashed very fast yesterday where I never noticed it. This is what I followed.

    https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#0

    I have a neighbor down the street that used to work for the police decrypting drives of criminals. Im going to speak to him later tonight to see if he can take a look at it. His career involves recovering data from drives, so Ill see if that leads anywhere. I dont have a spare HDD to even clone an image to at the moment, so unless theres a way to decrypt the drive other than needing a 320gb spare HDD, for now Ill have to go another route. Its definitely something from Nintendo that works with the demo unit, in the end it might be useless without the usb key.
     
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