Just a quick call out to see if there is any interest.
for use on Hard Drives:

Would you say there was much call for a tool that could:
1. Rip the contents of a parameter IC.
2. Checksum/CRC contents
3. Write data out to a storage file.
4. Re-program and validate Parameter IC's
5. No need to remove IC from donor/replacement PCB
6. cost for cross platform hardware & software about $100us

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

Im interested.

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me too

When it will work on Marvell embedded MCUs and ARM, drop me a line. Otherwise I stick on what already have / use

x3

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I am interested.

me too

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Tawfeek Mokhtar
http://alsafwapc.net
Alsafwa Data Recovery Egypt

Will it work on all drives , or limited to some particular brand ?

Hi,
Actually it is a tool I use for something else, I thought it might be useful for you guys and your disk drives parameter chips.

But i'm not going to release some sort of cheaply made crap, it has to be just right, specifically the software, I look around..... and the current state of recovery software makes me cry.

As regards to what 'it' works with, that would depend on how well designed the circuits for the disk drives are. (i've been out today expanding my library of scrap disk drives)

Reading in circuit is less of a problem than writing but I really don't want to drop a tool into public that shortens the life of the other components due to incorrectly reverse biasing the chips, because that is going to piss people off.

At this stage it is just a call to see what the interest is
The other thing I was looking at was a I2C/SPI realtime emulator(less interesting for recovery people), that could be dropped into the disk drive, to fiddle with the parameters in real time. (I don't think there has been any 'real' research into this area, obviously real time is dependent on 'when' the data is pulled into the disk C.P.U, but its still going to be faster than re-programming a full chip)

Before anyone thinks this is a "get rich" quick scheme, my main interest is a 'new' area for a Ph.D research project, as with any Ph.D work... you have to 'expand the boundary' of human knowledge/research.

_________________
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

Strange I was looking at I2C last week :O) I have very little time to do any large R&D projects but willing to help and test the device on my large :O) Collection of HDD's.

Up to you but I think it will be interesting to see what is happening under the hood

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

I knew a man (maybe you?) who used the I2C interface on an old IBM 2.5" to grab the master password way back in the late 90's

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Hi,
I'm old but was not involved with IBM drives in the 90's, but did work on 1541 CBM disk drives for designing copy protection software.

Hi guru,
At the moment the device is based on $2,000us of FPGA kit from Xilinx. Which, whilst a fantastic development platform and absolutely the fastest way of mocking up hardware, it is serious overkill.

I will keep your offer in mind if it progresses.

_________________
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

@code , if you see my early posts I was doing such research for real time parameter modding - made a pod for some drives with good results, the only main concern is how fast new drive families appear on market so was/is really useful?. About icp, is safe and easy at least in my stats.

Well,
We have some good progress...........
Most of the software was written in the local bar in H.K., So there is still some debugging needed.
Hardware and software to extract content is semi-finalized.

PCB is Quantum Phoenix 1997

And a hex dump of the data (0x400h of 8192 bytes)

Even at 400 khz, it's not exactly going to break the land speed record.

C.
(What is it with birds and engineers.... I can sit all afternoon in the pub reading the paper peacefully, but as soon as I pull my hardware out , there is a sudden excess of girls.)

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

sudden exit of girls for me ;o)

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Think so