Slashdot Mirror
Windows Phone Permanently Modifies MicroSD Cards, Warns Samsung
dotancohen writes "Don't put your MicroSD cards into Windows Phones. According to Samsung, doing so is a 'permanent modification' to the card, and it can no longer be used in other devices."
The S in SD means "Secure" which is an acronym for DRM ... and how that DRM exactly works is not public... Microsoft is probably using the DRM feature of the cards... where as most other companies to this point have not been that brave...
Its probably just the media class that is being changed. Within the first sectors of SD cards and flash drives there is a section which defines what kind of removable storage device it is. You can change this with certain tools to make things like flash drives that usually show up as removable storage show up like fixed drives so that you can boot from them. This simple change in the first chunk of the memory makes the system treat it entirely differently, allowing multiple partitions etc. So if the device is re-labeled as a different class in this memory segment it is quite possible that it would behave like this. The hp bootable USB utility can make this kind of change to a drive and so would probably be able to recover one of these 'modified' cards to a format usable by other devices.
The Windows Phone 7 operating system treats the SD card as an integrated part of the phone. This is in contrast to other devices, where you can use an SD card to increase the memory available to the device at any time or to transfer files to other devices,” the page reads.
To me this sounds like they are creating a disk pool that treats the internal memory and SD card as single logical volume, like LVM on Linux. In that case, even if other operating systems understood the formatting, it would be like yanking a single drive from a RAID array and expecting to get meaningful data off of it. It's possible in the forensic sense, but the data is incomplete and that's not how it is meant to be used.
I agree that you could probably reformat again, but they really should have been more upfront about the fact that sticking an SD card in a Windows Phone will result in permanent data loss.
The SD slot is intended to be used by the carrier to upgrade device internal memory. That's why there's a big old sticker over it saying it will void your warranty of you install it. There's really nothing wrong with this, IMO. It's more flexible than baking in the flash memory and having to go back to Foxconn for new orders of 64GB models.
The only reason it uses an SD card is because it's convenient to build, and it allows the different providers to use whatever size storage they want. In this phone, the SD card it not a user serviceable part.
That, and it doesn't even surprise me in the slightest that MS is going to require you to buy an SD card from THEM. At twice the price I'm sure, "for the added quality" of course. They're doing you a favor don't you see?
Who else in the world would consider making a proprietary format of SD card?
It's like those game consoles that can take a hard drive upgrade, but only if they get to dip their hand into your wallet during the upgrade, selling you an "upgrade kit" that gets you past their clandestine restrictions on swapping of hardware.
You can piss and moan all you want, but be sure to Vote with your wallet - it's the only vote they count.
Slipping a little bit more towards on topic though... the SD card format (sony iirc?) has a lot of cloak-and-dagger DRM features built into it, that up until now haven't gotten used much. There's a reason it's called a "secure digital" card. I expect this problem is coming up because when you stick in a new unlocked SD card, MS flips all the switches to turn on the DRM on the card, effectively bricking it for any device short of that specific phone you put it in. Preventing you from using it to move data between your phone and anything else. I'm sure they'll sell you an app to do that though.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.