The Slax Live-CD in a VM Summary

Here's my final(?) post on the Slax Live-CD running within a Virtual Machine to enable access to the hitachi's drive firmware using a USB<-> SATA Cable.

To reproduce my findings you need these three things:

• An USB<->SATA cable. I used this one;
• The free VMWare Player (link);
• The Live-CD iso including the VMWare Virtual Disk and VMWare Configuration File (link).

Unzip the live-cd package to a location of choice and open the slax.vmx file using VMWare Player. This will fire up the Slax Live-CD within the player. Once fired up login using "root" for user and "toor" for password.

After logging in use the modprobe-command:
modprobe usb-storage fix_inq_vendor_id=0x152d fix_inq_prod_id=0x2338
Please Note: vendor_id and prod_id will differ if you're using another device.

Use dmesg to find out if and where your device is located (mine was at /dev/sda). Use the modeb command to get the Hitachi-drive in modeb:
modeb /dev/sda

That's it: You can either release the USB device from here and continue your work in Windows (without a need to reboot) or you can just use the linux-environment within the VMWare player.