Just noticed this on a SD blog. It's about the universal algorithm which is supposed to work on all flash drives with NT or FAT Partitions. It sounds like it's based on the same idea of RAID Reconstructor.


Off the SD website....

'1, The Universal algorithm makes it available for SalvationDATA Flash Doctor to support all flash manufacturers and controllers based on the files system of FAT and NT while the competition supports a limited controllers and manufacturers;

2, Flash Doctor has a unique way of diagnosing the patient flash drives according to the file system. By this method, Flash Doctor will aren’t several virtual algorithm models by which all the read data will be verified accordingly and finally rebuild. In this way, the operation related to firmware layer will never be involved. people will never worry about the type of controller or manufacturer while others diagnose by the controller; '

I have limited experience in flash recovery so I was wondering if the flash gurus want to share their thoughts.

I'm sure they mean NTFS.

I would think they are using methods similar to hackers or codebreakers.
The object would be to identify a known file used by those filing systems. Try all possible permutations used by wear leveling algorithms until the known file is identified. Then apply that model to the dumped data and check the result. I don't know how many bytes or kilobytes in size the target file would have to be for this method to work?

It will take a fairly big inventory of file types used as reference. The majority of flash recovery invloves photographs, what if the flash drive only has Canon RAW files sotred on a fat file system, would the software be able to decypher that?

Also if this is a universal algorithm, how come they can only claim a success rate of 65%? In my experience nearly all flash media has FAT file system. Maybe ther other 35% of the flash drives in the market have encryption?


Please answer SD!

pc3k flash has something like that called data analysys autodetection
i've seen it perform correctly the removal of 15 step mixes and give full access to data from an unsupported controller by also determining the correct translator and it's parameters

the problem is that in most of the times, it won't work as smooth like that ...
in fact, some times it won't do nothing good at all
nand recovery tools are like "childrens" and they need time to grow up
for now in most times it's required a lot difficult interventions from experienced users

i think it is possible that sd came with a similar, and why not, maybe an even better algorithm, but as they claim it will be filesystem based (fat/ntfs)
that's why users should avoid using linux with nand technology, as always, linux will lack professional support from companies
(booo linux anyway, ms is better) -

-BR-