Hi all,

I have the Wellon VP-298 programmer.
What adaptors should I have in order the have the ability to dump flash chips out off usb flash/ssd drives etc?

The following website offers differents adaptors. What adaptors do you reccomand to buy?
http://www.mcumall.com/comersus/store/L ... ategory=30

I will gald to have more offers from other websites if you know some..

Best Regards,

Im not sure your model of programmer supports some of the more modern flash chips. One of the first programmers I had was the VP-290 and by todays standards its pretty useless.

I currently use a VP-890 which has much more support, but still is not the greatest programmer available.

Check that your programmer specifically supports what you need it to first

It is waste of money. This programmer can't read nand flash properly.

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NAND Reader from Soft Center would be a better choice

I am sure it will but the software license is too much high to be worthwhile for the amount of flash/SSD drives that we are get here.
So I am looking for a "meanwhile" other solution..

Hi,
You can buy the reader separate. you don't need to buy the licence at the same time. The Nand reader software is available for free, so you can dump chips. And it is a good reader.

If I have it wrong, please don't mind correcting me, but If you try and use a straight NAND reader for recoveries, how are you going to deal with the Mix, Xor etc of the dumps anyway, and regular NAND dumping with a programmer won't help you.

I am fairly sure that there is no viable "other" solution unless you are planning to write your own software to reconstruct everything the flash controller has mixed up.

I think I have one of those programmers or something really close.. I could dump a NAND firmware chip from a Digita set top box, but not from a chip from a flash drive.

Have you recovered from flash drives before? and if so what methods?

IMHO, either outsource flash drives, save the little commission you get from that and save to buy a licence, in the meantime read up on flash memory, blocks, sectors, FAT, pages, banks, ecc, xor etc etc.. There is a lot in it

welcome to keep this discussion going so we are clear on your hoped outcome and all opinions

HaQue has right. You can buy only reader. Then you can upload dumps for me or other person to solve it. It need proper knowledge about mixes, assemblers etc. Outsourcing in this case is good solution.

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Sounds like a good solution.
How much in % such solution can save from the total recovery price?

I am not sure I understand your question, could you say it in a different way?

I will have a stab anyway..

If you mean how much could you charge the customer, and how much would the person you send the dumps charge you, so you can work out a profit margin.. well that is up to the person/persons you decide to do business with, and it would be different probably for everyone.

say Arvika asked from you $75, you ask the customer for $100 and you get $25.

If you are asking what a going rate for DR on flash drives are, well that's going to be different based on the business, location, the actual engineer, quantity of cases etc. etc..
That discussion has been had many times with probably no real value.

But, I have found once you start solving cases, word gets around, suddenly it seems like flash drives are the most unreliable media ever (meaning you will start to get a lot of enquiries)

I don't know if you are an IT business or what, but a quite sensible path could be:

1. buy NAND Reader for.. IIRC $210
2. Read customers chips, send dumps of chips to a DR Engineer that you can strike up a deal with.
3. Start to get increased business/or not to see if added outlay is acceptable
4. if 3 is true, buy additional adapters for LGA etc as you can afford
5. if 3 is true, and getting better, then
6. Outlay for a licence, and start learning how to do it, while still outsourcing the hard ones or getting support from community to keep a quick turnaround of cases..
7. if 3 is true STILL, buy another solution as well such as ACE Laboratorys PC-3000 Flash SSD Edition.
8. Retire on your own Island in a Mansion and 12 beautiful ladies

Ok, exaggerated one of those steps...

I know how bad it is to start on a budget. I borrowed to outlay on a Salvation Data Flash Doctor. BIG MISTAKE. Tool is not exactly useful. wasted Money and lost income at the same time because could not solve cases. Could not afford to do anything else for quite some time...

good luck

Dear HaQue and arvika,

Thank you for your usefull answers. I will buy the adaptors and continue from there..

Best Regards,

Hi, Scorpion!
If you have PC3000 (udma, portable or express) i advice you to watch at PC3000 flash ssd. You'll get the nand reader which will be sufficient for a lot of cases. PC3000 flash has special mode for re-reading pages of the chip with uncorrectible errors. Very useful mode. Allow you re-read some set of pages and get the valid pages, without bit errors.
Also i've heard that ACE will release special power managment adaptor, which will allow you to choose the voltage for the nand chip. It is useful for some nand chips. Will allow you to read chip without big amount of bit errors.
And the last, you'll get special utilities that will allow you to recover data from a set of supported ssd by one step! Without outsourcing and help. ACE have done great work with ssd's and actively developing this trend.
Good luck!