# PFES-ENG-024 — Media Behavior

**Status:** Active  
**Knowledge Cycle Stages:** Understand, Validate

## Purpose

Describe how media participates in authentication, initialization, partition switching, descriptor retrieval, and firmware state transitions.

## Engineering Problem

Firmware behavior cannot be understood without representative media and media behavior cannot be separated from firmware interaction.

## Historical Engineering Evolution

Xbox authentication and unlock workflows showed that media transition state, challenge/response resources, and partition visibility directly affect firmware execution.

## Engineering Discoveries

- Media and firmware behavior form a closed loop.
- Representative images are necessary emulator inputs.

## Architectural Decisions

- Study media behavior systemically.
- Validate with real hardware whenever practical.

## Knowledge Produced

- Behavioral models
- Authentication sequences
- State transitions

## Knowledge Consumed

- Firmware interfaces
- Media topology
- Hardware traces

## Current Engineering State

Current work includes Xbox authentication, locked and unlocked views, descriptor reads, sticky descramble behavior, tray/media events, and partition transitions.

## Engineering Lessons

- Successful reads do not fully describe media behavior.

## Negative Knowledge

Project Frankenstein no longer assumes:

- Media is passive.
- A mounted filesystem demonstrates correct behavior.

## Current Implementations

- unlockdrive workflows
- Emulator auth sessions
- Hardware command logs

## Future Implementations

- Cross-media behavior models
- Automatic sequence validation

## Open Questions

To be expanded during engineering review.

## Why This Chapter Exists

Media behavior supplies the conditions under which firmware capabilities become observable.
