data-medics wrote:
I think you are vastly simplifying this task in your own mind. Before you should even consider trying to make your own tool, you'd need to spend about ten years working with an existing tool so you actually have some clue as to what these tools do and how complex they are. Then you'd need to study several different fields of programming and engineering. Then you'd need to either spend the next two hundred years reverse engineering every vendor specific command for every hard drive out there or find someone willing to just openly share all this (no one will, they've got too much invested in it).
There is a reason it takes an entire team of engineers and programmers in Russia to produce a tool like PC-3000. To think that one "old tech" is going to pull it off by himself is either pomp or just ignorance.
You have misunderstood my questions, they are unrelated. The question about downloading tables from a good, similar drive and uploading to a bad, similar drive was discussed back in the 2006 - 2008 era with someone who was doing it.
I have also traced the entire circuit of a hard drive and I have no difficulty understanding what is going on in the circuit. Back in the old days of computers, in the late 1970's and '80s, I used to replace heads in the field and re-align them using a special disk that had a track dedicated to a signal that could be seen on an oscilliscope. You aligned the heads by watching the amplitude and vertical evenness of the signal.
Mind you, disks only had 1000 tracks per inch in those days and that would be virtually impossible today.
As far as your claim that I am being pompous and ignorant, makes me think you are over-rating the complexity of the electronics and the reverse engineering. I took a look at the HRT board and I find the layout to be modest and very simple. Mind you, I have been working with computers at the hardware level since the 1970s, when processors were made with discrete transistors and hard drives were 18 inches in diameter and held only 5 megabytes of data.
With regard to reverse engineering.... far, far more complex coding has been cracked from manufacturers who were intentionally obfuscating code to protect it and using every imaginable trick to hide it. What they did not count on is that people exist who can do what you claim they cannot.
The hard drive manufacturers have no intention of hiding their codes and not much of it can be stored on the chips on hard drives. Applications can have several megabytes of code to wade through because it is written using a high level language. There is no high level language associated with hard drive code and they don't have the luxury of using extra code to obfuscate their code.
It may take years and years to decipher every code for every hard drive ever made but I am looking only at a Maxtor and there is a lot of information already available on the net for them. As I said, if I do this, it will be for sheer enjoyment, not to go into business.
It is a matter of finding a way to interrogate the chips to retrieve the data then relate that to the hard drive itself. That requires more dogged patience than brilliance.
I have been into reverse engineering for a couple of decades. I never do it for malicious purposes...I never crack a program and release it to the Net. I do it for pleasure, like doing a giant crossword puzzle.
I have reverse engineered a directx program where the mouse input and display is replaced by code from the directX environment. Therefore you cannot access the Windows code directly. That's why in games the screen goes full screen and the mouse cursor appears differently. They belong to the directx code, not the Windows code.
I reversed it by hooking the mouse code and following it back through the Windows system code to where it was connecting to the Windows code. That is infinitely more complex than trying to reverse engineer Assembly code related to a hard drive.