I am surprised he didn't try to lower the clock of the MCU of HDD first if he just wanted to delay the reply.
HDD Firmware Hacking
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fri…
The Galaxy smartphones are still some of the best.
They don't do VoLTE when rooted. Their own stock ROM is on par with iPhone-level unworkable UI garbage. Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy. The only ROMs you can feasibly get on most models are limited to GSI builds.
"The best" must be quite a low bar.
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fri…
The Galaxy smartphones are still some of the best.
That’s your opinion. I’ll never get one and I absolutely don’t trust Samsung with my personal data.
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#44Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189
How do I know if I have a drive in this situation?
In my case, the drive suddenly only shows having 1GB of read only space available. The firmware version will be reported as “ERRORMOD” (meaning, error mode). There are no warning signs, it just happens.
All data is lost the moment you see ERRORMOD, there is no recovery of data that I am aware of. It is sometimes possible to clear the drive and recover function for the now untrustworthy drive: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/pm9a3-firm...
It’s not the only way a drive can fail, but it’s the most immediately obvious one.
Other ways of the firmware failing result in no drive showing up at all, or data corruption. Physical failures can also happen, like breakage of the solder balls under the chips (which fixable enough to get data off it).
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Galaxy smartphones are still some of the best.
They don't do VoLTE when rooted. Their own stock ROM is on par with iPhone-level unworkable UI garbage. Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy. The only ROMs you can feasibly get on most models are limited to GSI builds. "The best" must be quite a low bar.
"Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy."
This is interesting, what are some examples?
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#46[deleted]
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#47The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother? One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code. I deleted my own…
> The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother? The lock on your front door is so trivial to bypass, yet deters the vast majority of people from entering your house without your permission.
Does it actually? I'm not sure anyone has ever tried to open my door when it was locked except me.
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#48I am surprised he didn't try to lower the clock of the MCU of HDD first if he just wanted to delay the reply.
That would be challenging. Its not a matter of replacing a quartz oscillator like in the eighties. HDDs run very integrated SOCs. Actual SATA, DMA state machines, everything is clocked from same crystal so you would have to know internal architecture very well (clock tree) and know actual internals of the PLL driving everything (registers/datasheet) to be able to reprogram/temporarily slow down just the CPU speed while maintaining SATA link.
Re: HDD Firmware Hacking
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't do VoLTE when rooted. Their own stock ROM is on par with iPhone-level unworkable UI garbage. Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy. The only ROMs you can feasibly get on most models are limited to GSI builds. "The best" must be quite a low bar.
"Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy." This is interesting, what are some examples?
Telegram. When I used that, everyone would get their messages except those who had a samsung because it's continuously on a background task shooting spree.
The weird thing is WhatsApp isn't affected but I'm never going to install that facebook crap. Even the mandatory work phone doesn't have it.