Minds@Work Digital Wallet Review by: Ted Felix December 2003

Steve Dempsey's website has his attempts at resurrecting Digital Wallets. Almost everything you need is there. Although one user I've talked to says that it only works via USB when you are done. No PCMCIA. Also check out Digital Wallet Rescue for more tales of repairing Digital Wallets.

I bought this in December of 2001 (maybe 2000) as I recall, and it worked without incident up until December 24, 2003 when it reported a "READ ERROR". Then after a few power cycles, it would no longer boot. My best guess is that the hard drive has somehow been damaged. My plan is as follows:

• Pull the hard drive
• Hook it up to a laptop.
• Boot the laptop with a DOS floppy
• Examine the sectors using debug. Capture the directory at least.
• Try to identify all files, and see if I have a copy of them.
• Note that owners should back up all system files on a Digital Wallet in case the hard drive goes south.
• See if you can dir the drive.
• Try to identify the filesystem based on a dump of the first few sectors.
• If it looks like DOS (FAT32), reformat it.
• Note any troubles during reformat.
• Copy back on all the files that are needed.
• See if it comes back to life.

That's the plan, at any rate. As I recall there were a few files that I have laying around from when I upgraded the "firmware". Hopefully that is everything I need to get the device back on its feet. I'm not sure that the device actually has "firmware" as it appears to be completely inoperative if it cannot read from the disk. I believe it loads its program from the disk at each boot.

At any rate, if there's anyone out there who has done any hacking on this device, or who may have worked for Minds@Work at some point in their lives, and can shed some light on this, we would all be very grateful. I will report anything I discover here in the interests of helping everyone keep their Digital Wallets alive for many years to come.

I plan to sift through the USENET archives and search the web extensively to see if I can find any clues related to the repair and feeding of a broken Digital Wallet. I might get lucky and find posts from former Minds@Work employees that might be willing to help us poor users out. Otherwise, hopefully someone else has done some hacking on the Digital Wallet and knows some of its secrets. I will gather all the information I find here.

Please email me if you have any information about the repair and maintenance of the Minds@Work Digital Wallet.

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