iPhone has a hidden SATA interface

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iPhone has a hidden SATA interface

I recently discovered something really wild: the iPhone has a secret SATA interface. Using the SATA interface, the iPhone is much easier to hack because it looks just like a hard drive to a computer, so you can replace individual executables and symlinks with no effort. Readers know that I'm a bit of a storage freak. A month or so ago, I was reading on Lifehacker about this cool SATA USB docking station where you can just slide a hard drive into the dock:

So I ordered one and set it up. The accident that unlocked all this is that I was getting up out of my desk chair while reading on my iPhone. The chair bumped me and I dropped the iPhone from a couple feet up. By some weird chance, it landed in the docking station. Not only did it fit perfectly, but a hard drive picture appeared on the iPhone's screen. Just a few seconds later, my Windows XP computer recognized the iPhone as an external hard drive! I pulled the iPhone out and was able to reproduce it by pushing the iPhone down hard into the docking station. Dropping it from couple feet the first time forced it into the connector, and it does take a little more muscle to make the connectors mesh than I'm used to with peripherals.

Anyway, this is what the iPhone looks like when it's docked as an external hard drive:

The iPhone is formatted with HFS+. I happened to have drivers for HFS installed on XP; the default installation of Windows doesn't have these drivers, but you can download hfsutils here. If you have hfsutils installed, the iPhone looks like a regular hard drive. I've been able to backup my iPhone and restore the image to my wife's iPhone with no problems (she still keeps her phone number of course). I'm not an expert iPhone hacker, even though I know a few things, so it's been slow-going. But I'm making solid progress and wanted to alert other people that the iPhone works in this way. I've tried a few other external SATA enclosures, but I've had best results with the Thermaltake so far.

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