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CompactFlash, SD, MMC, USB flash storage. Anything that does not have moving parts inside.
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advice for recovery hardware

September 1st, 2020, 16:43

Dear all,
I am new to this forum and the recovery field. I am a memory system expert, and I working on Flash storage reliability management.
But for my personal interest, I would like to learn how to recover data from emmc and UFS Nand chips. As for embedded devices, BGA packages are mostly used, it is not possible to connect to the JTAG pins without unmounting the chip.
So I would like to get advice on the best hardware setups to plug bga emmc/ufs nand chips to a computer for data recovery.
I have found XGecu kit which includes USB-JTAG programming cable and lots of BGA eMMC/Jtag and BGA UFS/Jtag adapters, and can be ordered on AliExpress.
Any other suggestion would be great. Thank you in advance.

Re: advice for recovery hardware

September 5th, 2020, 6:12

look at tools like VNR from Rusolut
Flash Extractor From Soft Center
PC3K from ACE Lab

You can connect to the (often undocumented) pads that connect directly to the NAND chips.

Re: advice for recovery hardware

September 6th, 2020, 6:14

Hello,
Thanks a lot for your reply.
These solutions seem great and all from european companies.
I am working on a personal project, thus they are still expensive for me. I am looking in basic hardware and software bricks which I could put together though.

Regards,
Florian

Re: advice for recovery hardware

September 7th, 2020, 4:49

what is your main goal? it is a very Vague question. recovering from flash appears pretty simple until you get into the sheer variety of stuff you will encounter. you could either spent the same amount of time developing your own tools as these companies (years) and have to research and update it constantly, or buy a tool.

If you have no actual device or chip to focus on, a general tool will be a huge undertaking. There are many ways to read a chip, and what will come through the door will invariably be something you have not implemented yet.

BTW there is very little to no documentation available, it is mostly reverse engineered.

with the soft center reader available for $215, that supports many chips, IMHO it would be crazy to design yet another.

VNR is another great tool.

in the long run you will spend an immense amount of time and money

This is not like building other stuff with embedded sdk's or uCPUs etc where you get dev kits.

If you think you can build a reader from some sort of CPU / PLDC / ASIC etc.. and get it to just poll the ONFI data and read it based on that, you will be in for a shock..
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