FATX-on-a-snake

Small python utility to play with FATX partitions

This is an educational python utility that lets you walk around in a FATX partition and exporting/importing files from/to it. The goal is to Understand, understand the concept of loveFATX, uh!

REMEMBER TO MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR PARTITION

Status

At the moment, you can safely read files and meta data with this utility. It is missing only some documentation and I would love to add more options/methods to retrieve data in more useful ways in the future. Writing is possible but limited. You should ALWAYS make a backup of your data before even thinking about using my tool in write mode.

Stuff that works great:

• List files and folders
• Exporting of files / unpacking of partitions
• Creation of folders
• Import of files

Stuff that somewhat works:

• Creation of new partitions
• Packing of partitions

Stuff that I still work on:

• Documentation
• Some code clean-up
• Deleting files / freeing space
• Filesystem checks
• Time/Date meta information
• XMU support(they have a diffrent sector size)
• Support for working with blockdevices directly

Stuff thats still on my wishlist:

• in-place editing/replace of files
• exporting virtual file interfaces
• rewrite everything in Rust as a fusedriver 😇

Quick Usage:

To unpack an image run:

python3 unpack.py fatx.img /tmp

Which should result in something like this:

FATX ~ FAT: 313344 entrys of 4 bytes each
Unpacked 226 files.

Usage:

Run main.py to verify everything checks out

python3 main.py /path/to/partition.img

where partition.img is a FATX partition. Not a Xbox harddrive image. Just a plain partition. Note: Huge (>4 GB) partitions may take a while... I didn't bother with optimisations yet.

Run unpack.py to export all files & folders of a partition

mkdir tmp/
python3 unpack.py /path/to/partition.img tmp/
cd tmp && ls

Run pack.py to create new partitions based on a local folder. You must provide the target partition size in bytes, a src folder(can be empty, will result in an empty but valid image) and a name for the new partition. The volume ID is randomly generated.

python3 pack.py 524288000 src/ dest.img

Run extract_blocks.py to easily access the most important parts of a FATX partition. i.e. look at the exported binarys with a hexeditor.

python3 extract_blocks.py /path/to/partition.img
cd partition.img.extract && ls

Example API usage:

Open your image file and print some information

from fatx import FATX
fs = FATX.Filesystem("/home/mhamilton/fatx.img")
fs.status()

Access the root ('/') of your filesystem and list the files in it. We get back a list of FatxObjects, so we have to put some extra effort into printing it nicely

root = fs.root
print([str(i) for i in root.ls()])
"['Audio','fonts', ...]"

Retrieve a file you like to take a close look at with get() or using its index

audio = root.ls()[0]
audio = root.get('Audio')
print(audio.details())

Actually, Audio is a directory. Lets take a look at the files inside it

print([str(i) for i in audio.ls()])
"['AmbientAudio', 'MainAudio', ...]"
print([str(i) for i in audio.get('MainAudio').ls()])
"['Global A Button Select.wav', 'Global B Button Back.wav', ...]"

That Global A Button Select.wav sounds interesting, lets export it. The exportFile() method returns the file as an array of bytes. So we have to write it to disk ourselves.

file = audio.get('MainAudio').get('Global A Button Select.wav')
f = open(file._name, 'wb')
f.write(file.export())
f.close()

Importing a file is as easy as this. Note that this writes to disk. Since I'm not yet confident enough it works flawless, the software ships read only. Go into fatx/FATX.py and change the READ_ONLY = True to False at the top of the file. But be aware, you may lose (all) data if you or FATX-on-a-snake do something stupid. You can only import files into directories

f = open("newAudio.wav", "rb")
audio.import_file("newAudio.wav", f.read())
f.close()

Renaming is done with the rename() method (obviously).

newFile = audio.get('newAudio.wav')
newFile.rename('oldAudio.wav')

Inorder to delete a file, use the delete() method. At the moment, only 'soft' deletion is supported, where the data remains on the disk but the file is marked as deleted. You can see such files with ls(deleted=True).

audio.get('oldAudio.wav').delete()
audio.ls(deleted=True)

The parent() method always returns the upper directory. If you call it on your root object, it returns itself.

audio.ls() == newFile.parent().ls()