AmpBenzScientist @AmpBenzScientist@qoto.org

I hope I can port some older firmware to my SDD. Everything is coming together well but the firmware was part of a development kit. I have one shot to get this firmware correct and flash it correctly. No pressure, right?

@Placholdr MIT Open CourseWare, it's really good and free.

@freemo That seems to be Maxima by definition. A Global Maxima too.

@Amikke Kids will grow up as they always have. I don't feel sad for the children, I'm almost envious of the challenges that they will have the opportunity to solve and the world they will create.

Only a little bit more Reverse Engineering work left to go. I just need to find the exact instruction set and security checks that will be bypassed.

I found an old open source project that replaced the firmware on the previous generation of drives by another manufacturer. It's not going to work perfectly as is and will require porting.

I expect that it's not going to work perfectly or reliably at first. No idea when it will be done.

@kreyren Somewhat, but the port areas are still going through lockdowns for Covid-19 the last I heard.

@crackurbones My copy of I M Gelfan's 1947 Lectures on Linear Algebra was far more concise than the text for the course. For Soviet Mathematicians there was a very heavy emphasis on theories. This was how I was taught Mathematics.

Also Soviet and Russian Doctoral dissertations have to be presented in the presence of the entire Mathematics Department. They would be challenged by anyone and have to tirelessly defend their dissertation until it was proven to be solid.

From my former Soviet Mathematics Professor, "The Mathematics program had many students, those who couldn't make the grade became Physicists or Chemists. The students who were pushed out of the Mathematics Program were not failures but went on to become leaders in their respective fields."

CortexM3 or M4 are likely the Core with it likely running a RTOS of some variety.
The nrf52832 used the M4 Core and a Broadcom wireless chip used the M4 or M3. That's enough of this rabbit hole for now.

SWD, newer ARM JTAG or Both? 2 marked pins(on the other side) and 18 pads. ARM JTAG is 14 or 20 pin. A pin and a pad are connected by a trace so I would assume that it is both SWD and JTAG. This should help a lot.

A 2 Pin connector and 18 pads. Would that mean a standard SWD 2 pin on ARM v 5 and up or the 20 pin connector used by ARM? Would a manufacturer make the flash only writeable through the ARM based MCU that it would be read through? Let's see how complex this MCU can be for 14x14.
It has to handle read and writes to flash and interface to SATA III. I'm fairly confident that it is ARM based, 32bit and efficient or specialized. Single or Dual core, ARMv7 or related version? Stay tuned.

I'm wondering about data recovery on SSDs now. In theory the data would still be present on the drive even if not detected. The Phison s11 has been known to fail and rename the drive, this was due to the older firmware. The effected drives can be REFLASHED which includes FORMATTING and they will work again. The latter firmware seems to fail safe into a read only mode.

I'm wondering if there's a way to put the controller into an Engineer mode or Recovery mode so that the entire drive can be imaged. It's not perfect but some advanced forensics tools should be able to recover and reconstruct files from this. I haven't found anything regarding recovery of data on the drives apart from sending them in for data recovery.

I took apart one of my S11 drives and found a 2 pin header and several pads on the bottom. Bed of Nails testing or recovery. I'll keep looking into the hardware side as well as the code.

Harddrive firmware upgrade utilities were very impressive to me. Having seen the SSD counterpart I'd have to say that it is far more impressive and to be expected. Hardware builders can't write good firmware and a good toolkit is needed to make a drive functional again.

The SSD utility has the same simple elegance as the HDD utility. The complexity, security, capability and languages used are astonishing in the SSD utility. I have yet to get to the actual firmware but this is beautiful. It seems that large portions were actually written in ASM. It's not as cool as the time I got to mess with missile guidance code. With how well this is written, I would recommend that anyone with an S11 based SSD (A large portion of the market) upgrade to the latest firmware with the official tools provided. I'll push forward but these people have just shown me that they can build good hardware and software.

@PawelK wielkie dzięki

@PawelK Phison s11 series, the proletariat's controller. I should have everything I need to dig in deeper. My preferred goal is to bypass the checks and use an open source firmware on this platform.

It will take time to do this. The basic information is public knowledge. The controller maps the flash out and keeps firmware, or at least a large part of it, on the flash. Nearly everything is documented online but it's not going to be trivially easy to do.