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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: August 1st, 2013, 11:32 
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digitalferret wrote:
@hddguy, acknowledged, wrong generation.

The principle is still valid, isn't it?

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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: August 1st, 2013, 20:51 
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acecomputers wrote:
Thanks to everyone!

The customer data is mostly backed up but they are missing a few months worth of info and this is mostly an exercise to see if we can identify the problem and rectify or recover cheaply, which sort of rules out specialist recovery - I doubt that they are willing to spend over £100 to be honest but as a challenge it is worth looking at!?

We will now attempt testing of the components to see if we can identify problems there - thanks particularly to fzabkar for all links posted and digital ferret for your contact suggestion.

This is by no means over yet so any more info and suggestions would be welcomed.

By the way HaQue - I might have one of these to play with for you soon!



i hope your kidding on the £100 for the recovery and the customer does not want to
spend more on the recovery give it them back
no really data recovery company will not touch that for that type of cost
possible a computer repair job would.

your going to spend a lot of time
around 10 hours with these type of ssd drives

are they easy to work with answer is no
are there a lot of pit falls yes there is

we spent our time in building our own schematics

but once you do this
you know how they work and the main issues
and when the next job comes along you know what to do


there a lot of miss information on how to repairs these units.
on the net.

we slowly deciding to get back into ssd recovery
as we like the challenges


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: August 1st, 2013, 21:09 
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fzabkar wrote:
HaQue wrote:
obviously J5 is serial port, UART or whatever you want to call it, but what is J3?

http://flash-extractor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3669

"... you can test by shorting the firmware jumper near the SATA connector, the drive should ID as YATADONG BAREFOOT."



the board has to be in working order
which his boards not.


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: August 1st, 2013, 21:28 
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craig6928 wrote:
fzabkar wrote:
HaQue wrote:
obviously J5 is serial port, UART or whatever you want to call it, but what is J3?

http://flash-extractor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3669

"... you can test by shorting the firmware jumper near the SATA connector, the drive should ID as YATADONG BAREFOOT."



the board has to be in working order
which his boards not.

That's not how I understand it.

The above link seems to suggest that an SSD which appears to be dead (ie one that does not ID in the normal way) may still have a functional controller, and that this can be confirmed by shorting the "FW" jumper.

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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: August 1st, 2013, 21:46 
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As far as I know there is no working DR solution for this controller.
You may try to short the jumper and the drive might even come ready from the Boot code but it won't bring you closer to getting data off the drive.

Because there is no working solution available you probably have three options:
1. Wait until there is a working solution (could take years)
2. Try to reach to Indilinx (I believe OCZ bought them) and ask them if they could recommend something to recover data (it's very long short, probably won't get you anything)
3. Try to RE FW on this drive, or outsource this task. Then write your own code (based on RE results) that would replace existing FW on the drive and make it accessible to the point when you can get data off the chips. (this is very expensive, we are talking about thousands of dollars)

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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: August 1st, 2013, 23:09 
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IIRC, Jeremy Brock said somewhere that they were working on SSD drives, not based on Flash Extractor solution. Cant remember specifics, but might be worth it to talk to him. Hes at http://www.recovermyflashdrive.com/


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 24th, 2015, 14:22 
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Location: Florida - USA
Just got one of these in with similar problems. Green LED when powered on but no registers. Can short pins and get it to come ready and go intosafe mode but no current tools seem to support Everest 2. Going to connect to terminal today and see what i can find out there.

This topic is a little old so anyone have any newer updates on these drives? Any success?


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 24th, 2015, 20:18 
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I am finding the current situation has to be one of the following:

1. SSDs are surprisingly not failing as much as we all thought they would
2. Customers that get a failed SSD either elects not to go with DR at the computer shop desk after being told they cant be recovered / are too expensive
3. They are somewhat tech savvy enough to get an SSDD put in, and when failure happens, have backups(doubt this) or data is not important (games machine)
4. There aren't that many SSDs old enough to have a huge influx.
5. I just aren't getting many in due to coincidence or my city is too old school...

I rarely get 2 of the same type in, and most of them are Sandforce that I dont have a solution for, and haven't time to play around. I have a few other ones to look at but again no time - only one mSATA is an actual ongoing job - and that is Sandforce.


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 0:31 
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HaQue wrote:
IIRC, Jeremy Brock said somewhere that they were working on SSD drives, not based on Flash Extractor solution. Cant remember specifics, but might be worth it to talk to him. Hes at http://www.recovermyflashdrive.com/


Meh, I assume my NDA expired/isn't valid anymore
Indilinx died when OCZ went bankrupt and was sold to Toshiba at the fire sale. Good luck contacting anyone none of the original Indilinx engineers are there.

Before the sale of Indilinx to OCZ was finalized internally within the company I went to their offices in Korea. They gave me custom firmware that runs on the SDRAM to turn the drive into a NAND reader via SATA. They also gave me the commands to access the NAND via the controllers safe mode (much slower)... Also got the FTL data structures for their products and development boards.

Marvell's NDA forbid IndiLinx/OCZ from sharing access codes with me so all I got was their 1st and 2nd gen Indilinx products.. They asked for failure analysis information on each drive and that I do the jobs inexpensively. Since I had the special FW and wrote software to rebuild the corrupt FTL data structures each job took me <= 2hrs making it possible.

They were really a nice group of people, it's one of my fondest memories.

That said, all the code / information is on a hard drive somewhere, there is no demand, I haven't gotten an Indilinx case in 3yrs, the company doesn't exist. My resources are better applied elsewhere.

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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 1:09 
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Thanks Jeremy, interesting info there. Pretty envious of that experience.. Agree that time is better spent elsewhere, would be nice to have a lab with departments and SSD guys to develop new tech, but somethings gotta fund that, and I see no angels coming my way anytime soon.

I have a couple of SSDs I got today for analysing, a Sandisk Ultra Plus, Marvell based one and a Samsung ARM based.
turning it into a NAND reader is genius, I wonder how hard that is to develop. I can see many nights in IDA ahead..

how did you have to load the firmware, if you can say? this leads me to think electronics failures are not really common and most times it is firmware/config/FTL that craps out

thanks for sharing, appreciate it.


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 5:09 
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Quote:
I have a couple of SSDs I got today for analysing, a Sandisk Ultra Plus, Marvell based one and a Samsung ARM based.
turning it into a NAND reader is genius, I wonder how hard that is to develop. I can see many nights in IDA ahead..

I guess it would be cheaper to buy a tool, than develope your own.


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 5:51 
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Is there a tool that does this? such as a dead SSD, and does what Jeremy described? If so could you chuck a link up?


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 6:01 
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HaQue wrote:
Is there a tool that does this? such as a dead SSD, and does what Jeremy described? If so could you chuck a link up?

Not fully dead drives. Hardware level should be fine (in the common cases it is fine). Cant believe you have not heard anything about PC3000 SSD. :)


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 7:19 
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I have heard about it ;)
but as I don't own one, I don't know the capabilities, and I didn't know it could extract NAND through SATA from a failed SSD, or upload custom firmware to SDRAM.


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 8:00 
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All depends on drive, but main features are:
  • Building the drive logical image via FTL analyzing and reading the chips
  • Working with service structures(backuping, writing, low level formatting)
  • Saving NAND chips dumps
  • Unlocking password-locked SSD
  • Viewing defects
  • Viewing/clearing SMART


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 11:15 
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HaQue wrote:
how did you have to load the firmware, if you can say? this leads me to think electronics failures are not really common and most times it is firmware/config/FTL that craps out


The only hardware failures I saw were when other DR companies worked on them, otherwise 100% of the time it was FTL data structure corruption.

To load the FW I'd jumper the drive so it booted up as YATAPDONG send the access code copy the FW into SDRAM then change the jump instruction to the FW bootloader.

If you know the architecture (eg: ARM) and the registers its pretty easy to develop an FTL to do whatever you want, Indilinx open sourced the code for accessing the controller's boot rom (safe mode) and released the source code for some very basic FTL designs on their barefoot platform. I helped document, code and debug parts of the project :-)

You can download it here:
http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/Downloads

It might be difficult to get the OpenSSD board but you can recompile the FW loader pretty easily by changing some static variables to work on a retail barefoot drive.

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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 11:22 
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bubaleh wrote:
All depends on drive, but main features are:
  • Building the drive logical image via FTL analyzing and reading the chips
  • Working with service structures(backuping, writing, low level formatting)
  • Saving NAND chips dumps
  • Unlocking password-locked SSD
  • Viewing defects
  • Viewing/clearing SMART


Are you describing some features of the PC3K-SSD edition (chip off) and some features of the SATA one?

I have yet to see any tool save raw NAND dumps (as you would get if you chip off-ed it) through SATA. if it can do that, it would need to be updated for a heap of different models IMHO.

Side Note - looking in firmware update of the Sandisk and I found this funny:
Code:
53 6D 61 72 74 53 65 6C 66 54 65 73 74 20 SmartSelfTest
6E 6F 74 20 73 75 70 70 6F 72 74 65 64 20 not supported-
2D 20 56 45 52 59 20 42 41 44 21 VERY BAD!


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 11:42 
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Joined: March 14th, 2013, 19:15
Posts: 24
Location: Florida - USA
Terminal does nothing when powered on normally
If i short Rom pin i get "ROM reset!" but nothing else. The drive comes ready and Ids as
OCZ-VERTEX4 FACTORY
sn OCZ-0987654321
ROM 0.06
shows full capacity at 238.47gb and access all sectors however data is not correct.

There are jtag pins on bottom connector of the SSD i will explore this later


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 11:55 
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Ah yes, the old Jasmine. I had a message to you asking if it was worth looking into for about a year, and deleted it as you hadn't visited in so long I thought you were gone.

I noticed there is a new project "Cosmos OpenSSD Platform" http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/Cosmos_OpenSSD_Platform

not sure how this will relate to DR, but it looks ultra-interesting anyway. Hope I can afford one.


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 Post subject: Re: OCZ Vertex 4 128gb UART Recovery method?
PostPosted: April 27th, 2015, 12:02 
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Quote:
Are you describing some features of the PC3K-SSD edition (chip off) and some features of the SATA one?

All features for the SATA. There is another soft for the chip off data recovery - PC3K Flash. :)
Quote:
I have yet to see any tool save raw NAND dumps (as you would get if you chip off-ed it) through SATA

IMHO, it is not most required function, because many modern drives encrypt the user data. But PC3k SSD do it for some drives.


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