[Cryptography] My ignorance and drive firmware hacking

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Wed Feb 25 03:25:50 EST 2015


Robert L Wilson <wilson at math.wisc.edu> writes:

>A couple of years ago I had a (Seagate, 1TB) disk drive in a PC "fail" and I
>could not tell what was wrong with it. I sent it to a company I had dealt
>with before who would attempt to recover data. (Some was backed up but not
>some other stuff I really cared about. Shame on me...) They did their job
>nicely, and their verdict on the drive was "firmware corruption". I had never
>before thought about the firmware being field rewritable.

It doesn't necessarily need to be rewritable to deal with a firmware
corruption issue, it could just be a case of swapping out the controller board
with one from another drive of the same model, which used to be a standard
means of dealing with failed controller issues.

(Glossing over a lot of details here, e.g. whether the controller loads its
firmware from the host protected area and lots of other technicalities).

Peter.


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