Hi... reading tsop chips

[dick]

Just a quick post to get me off the bottom rung.

Has anybody managed to read off tsop chips from a usb flash drive in a willem or similar and then reconstruct the filing system from the raw data?

Could it be done by emulating the controller chip?

[dobrevjetser]

Hi Dick,

I tried it once with no luck. It is as if the programmer skips some bytes when reading.

Best regards,

Dobre

[pepe]

Yes.

it can be done, I have done a bunch.

pepe

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

Hi Pepe ,
First You Need a Very good EPROM Programmer .Then secondly you should keep in mind that there could be certain bad blocks in that IC .They Mark them during factory level testing .thirdly You Need To Reconstruct The Data ,Can You Specify What You Did and What Tools you have .

[Starling]

It's impossible to reconstruct filesystem from raw data if you don't know how translator works on this particular model.
Even raw recovery won't work.

[dick]

Yes.

it can be done, I have done a bunch.

pepe

I bet you don't want to give away how you managed it.

Obviously the data is written to the memory using 'wear leveling' a method by which the whole of the available memory space is used. I understand a wear leveling algorithm is used to achieve this.

Pepe you must of worked this out. Does the algorithm vary between different controller manufacturers? Or has this now been standardised?

Maybe one method to understand how it works would be to start with a single chip stick:
First the easy bit.....
low level format the user data space.
remove flash chip and read in a quality programmer/reader.
replace chip in memory stick and write a known pattern of file and folder data to the memory.
again remove flash chip and read tsop in programmer/reader

Now the results can be compared. Comparing the 2 dumps importantly the SA can be isolated from the dumps.

Now the harder part....
its a matter of working out the algorithm to reconstruct the known raw data into files and folders.

Pepe, is that how you did your first one?

Also is there anything useful for info for us in the SA?

[pcimage]

Yes.

it can be done, I have done a bunch.

pepe

I've done loads too!

You just need the right tools, software and knowledge!

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

Hi PCI image ,
Please Pm Me with Some Details Of the Same .