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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."
Say what now?.... If this is even possible there is something really wrong with the SD card in question...
Your memory will be made to service us. You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
Hmm... maybe it zaps the card with excess current?
This information alone means that I'll avoid ever getting a Windows phone, even if it should have tremendous advantages otherwise.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I guess putting a MicroSD card into one of these phones probably would have to qualify it as "expendable"...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
So as far as the consumer is concerned, you can't expand the storage on a Windows 7 phone either.
I'd try SDFormatter to fix them.
http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter/
http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter_3/
The ghacks story that is linked to just cites engadget as a source... who don't mention *anything* about it "permanently modifying" the MicroSD cards, just that the manufacturers and microsoft are requiring that the cards are certified.
I skimmed the articles, and they were short on information regarding exactly what was done.
I don't know anyone with a Win7 phone, nor do I expect that any of my friends will get one, so I won't have a chance to test it. My suspicion is that they use yet another filesystem, which is unusable by other platforms. To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to permanently write to a card so it can only be used on a device. The only way to make a card unusable is to write to it too much, making it worthless to any device. I've only done that to a few. :) If there is a way, I'd love to know how. It would be nice to set up a card that can only be read on *MY* machine, so if someone snags it, they can't read the contents.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It's not a "normal" consumer accessible slot; they're buried, and you have to disassemble the phone and void your warranty to get at it. As far as the consumer is concerned, it's not even there.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
They turn into Blue MicroSDs Of Death, something very valuable for cyber ninjas.
From Microsoft's KB2450831 support article:
..The Microsoft Phones are going to use the SD card for some sort or Swapfile / Cache (Or something like that)
Since the "approved" card must have fast, random Read/Write access.
Expect to require a new SD card every few months if that's the case...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
It would be nice to set up a card that can only be read on *MY* machine, so if someone snags it, they can't read the contents.</p><p>
</p></quote>
You could always try encryption - there are many programs which will encrypt any read/writes made to a particular drive
for the slashdot crowd it should be nothing to hook it up to a mcu and zero it out in spi bitbang mode, so its only permanent for most people, but your right its flash, the only way to really fubar one is to burn out the gates
If the phone is using the seldomly-used DRM part of the SD specification to lock the card, this could be an opportunity for hackers to find out how the SD card DRM works.
Samsung have documented the feature for the Focus, saying that inserting a MicroSD card into a Windows Phone can be considered a “pernament modification” adding ”it will no longer be readable or writable on any other devices such as computers, cameras, printers, and so on”.
The two sources quoted (Samsung and MS) aren't contradictory. Given these two (incomplete) statements, I would guess that Windows Phone is formatting the card using some sort of disk pooling scheme, similar to LVM, and thus the data on the card is only meaningful as part of the entire pool. This may not be truly permanent from the point of view that you might be able to reformat the card, but it is permanent in the sense that any data that was on there before has been lost for good.
BS. It probably just formats it using exFAT if it's not formatted already, or when the user formats it. It's not possible to permanently make a card unreadable on other systems - reformatting and/or repartitioning the card will do the trick. Even if that were possible, this would be too blatant a bug to have slipped through QA.
you don't have a windows 7 phone anyway! (Neither do I.. due to stupid shortages in Canadialand) but that's besides the point.
did you forget to take your meds?
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.
Nice one MS - bone everybody for your FAT32 "patents" for years, then ditch it entirely for a double-secret proprietary format.
You don't understand Microsoft, that's all. You think Microsoft is a software and hardware company, but it isn't. Microsoft is an evil company that uses "mistakes" in software and hardware to deliver evil. It's the evil that is important to Microsoft, the money is secondary. That may sound like an anti-Microsoft opinion, but what other idea could you have, given the facts? Certainly Microsoft knew about that issue. Certainly Microsoft knew it would lower the profits, especially since they didn't warn anyone.
Was this really a surprise? Sure, no one probably saw this particular problem coming, but we all knew something really screwed up would be discovered soon after MS released its "Win7" mobile OS. The only question here is whether "MS certified" is a lame attempt to make excuses for the problem or if represents a new revenue stream creation strategy. Watch out, now MicoSD cards have to be "certified" to work in a MS product. Something tells me that the certification comes cheap. Thank God that we all still have MS to point to and laugh at!
More correctly, it uses MTP, which has implementations on operating systems other than Windows.
In any case, you should have better researched your purchase.
I'm not sure about these phones, but the Razrs, Nexus One and pretty much all the other ones have the slot right next to the SIM card slot or in a similar area. Sure it's not easily gotten to by people who don't know how, but it's hardly buried.
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.
Actually with SD it probably IS possible to lock a card to a specific device, simply encrypt the whole unit, that way even the MBR can't be read by anything but the device that set the encryption key.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
They are on Win7 phones - I think all the ones I've seen reviewed so far have placed the MicroSD card slot behind a "Warranty void if removed" sticker in one way or another.
Microsoft says that you're not even supposed to be using the card slot yourself with your own cards; that it's intended for the manufacturer of your phone, so I'm not really seeing the issue here.
If you don't need a shovel to get to it, it's not buried.
3/4 of the launch phones have the SD slot internal, only one AFAIK has the slot under the battery.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've been studying SD cards for the last few months and I've managed to dig up some heretofore "secret" leaked documents about SD Digital Rights Management mechanism and I think I know how such a permanent modification could be performed.
One of the things that all SD cards support is the ability to designate a certain portion (which can include ALL) of the card's block storage as "secure". Once designated as secure, the blocks in question cannot be read, written to, or the area resized without performing an authentication step with the card. This authentication step is known as "AKE".
I'm willing to bet that the phone is using this "secure" facility and marking the entire card, or some significant portion thereof, as a secure storage area.
WM6.5 has an option to encrypt the card, making it readable only on the device that performed the encryption, but I haven't used it, so I can't tell you how well does it work.
What I do know is that you could always encrypt the whole card with TrueCrypt, making it readable only to YOU, provided you don't share the key.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
The SD card in WP7 devices is NOT user serviceable. MS uses SD cards as a cheap alternative to other kinds of storage solutions. To exchange the SD card, you have to tore open the phone. People have been trying to replace the provided card to get more space, that's it. So I see it as no big deal that the OS thrashes it, since it was never intended to leave the phone anyway. That said, I wouldn't buy a WP7 phone for other reasons: it copied the iOS model by Apple by the book - specially the silly restrictions (no multitasking to 3rd party apps, tie-in to a proprietary app, no fscking copy-and-paste, etc.).
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Why does Microsoft eschew conventional methods of interfacing with MicroSD cards for this piece of hardware? Do they have too many problems with customers using their MicroSD cards for multiple things and then messing up files that are important for the WP7 device? Is there a better solution?
Twinstiq, game news
At least Nokia advertises for the N900 the SD card is hot-swappable.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
My question is: why we didn't hear about these requirements (the internal storage is spanned onto the expansion microsd storage--with vague requirements) when the devs started getting kits and working with this almost a year ago. So much for getting good advance info about this fantastic new product into the ether. Nah: We'll just spew the marketing cruft instead. It's easier. >sigh
Content Protection for Recordable Media is the DRM scheme provided by the Secure Digital specification.
Is everyone on Slashdot too stupid to realize that the S in SD means Secure and is an allusion to the fact that the card supports DRM at the hardware level?
Don't mod down GP though..
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
One word: Stargate.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Yeah, but if Windows can't find an MBR it won't be able to format it, you'd need something lower level.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've had my MBR overwritten just by booting from an XP installation disk and cancelling the install process before it ever gets to the question about formatting my drive.
Actually, he probably wanted the word "synonym."
Synonym: Two words that can be interchanged in a context are said to be synonymous relative to that context.
Euphemism: An inoffensive or indirect expression that is substituted for one that is considered offensive or too harsh.
I just pooped your party.
So, why does the Windows phone warn Samsung when it permanently modifies a MicroSD card?
sic transit gloria mundi
diskpart / select disk x / clean / create partition primary
Gosh! I am now so glad that I cannot add memory to my iphone :-)
If the SD standard allows for this then the standard is broken.
All devices - particularly media devices - should be able to be reset to a "clean" state, where the only changes are those put in by the firmware to track remapping, "odometers," and the like and this "firmware"-controlled data is unwritable by ANY consumer device.
You can make a DRM-enabled chip that meets these requirements and meet what I think are Microsoft's requirements fairly easily. You need to have an instruction to the firmware to "lock" the SD device to the host device so only "authorized" devices - or only this device - can read it, an "unlock/modify lock" instruction that can only be executed by devices authorized to change the lock settings, and a "reset card" instruction accessible to any device that will scrub the card of all usable information and THEN after the scrub finishes, remove all the locks and finally do a standard format operation.
It sounds like the latter or perhaps the last two operations are missing from the SD standard or missing from most implementations.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
WM 6-6.5 encrypt on a file by file basis, storing the keys in some file in Windows\System in the main memory. The advantage of this method is that the filesystem on Windows only sees .menc files that are readable by the keys stored with that device.
SD cards include an internal encryption capability. It's an old leftover from the CPRM DRM scheme. CPRM is abandoned now, but the old hardware to support it is still part of the SD specification.
I think you are wrong sir. The storage management snap-in used in XP treats partitions without a mbr or any sort of filetable it can recognize as uninitialized and offers you the option of formating them.
CD's and USB sticks that become permanently modified to only work with one computer? Peripherals like monitors, keyboards and mice designed to imprint and recognize only the first machine they see for "performance" ?
I have a microSD card in my nokia, its 1gb, and it hasn't moved in the 2 years I've had the phone. How often do you swap the microSD cards in your phones? for one they're absolutely tiny for starters and the slots are often in under the battery on many phones so tbh I think its perfectly acceptable that they're using it as a memory expansion device. Yes, they probably should ask the user what they want the card to be used for upon insertion, but I highly doubt they just reformat the card without asking permission.
The reasons why I don't purchase/use Microsoft products, let me count the ways... Doh! No matter how big a number, I still don't get to infinity!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
First keep in mind that I work for an Electrical and Computer Engineering department at a university. We aren't training artists here.
So a group of students from a particularly problematic lab come and ask a completely nonsensical question. We can't even understand what the fuck they want, and suspect they don't know what they want either (this happens more often than you'd think). They want a converter cable, we get that much. With some difficulty and showing them various cables we arrive at the fact that they want DB9 to HD15. WTF? We tell them there is no such thing and could they please let us know WHY they want such a thing.
Well see they are giving a presentation using a laptop that is hooked to a projector. They need to hook up a second protector, so they figured they'd use the DB9, aka serial, port. Yes, really. They could not understand why this would be a problem.
Some people just want to plug anything in to anything and figure it is just a simple cable that'll make that happen.
Try reading the Article.
Now Engadget have discovered that the Windows Phone OS makes permanent changes to a card that can prevent it from being read, written to or formatted on any other device.
So, no.
eh, scuzzi, eh
Infuriate left and right
Part of the SD spec allows you to assign a password to a card, effectively locking it out of any other device (that can't send the low level command + password to the card.)
Karnal
Well I see two sides to this. On the one hand the fact that MS treats the internal memory and SD card as one volume is pretty cool. I hate that my nexus one has only 512 MB internal flash I mean whats 4gb of flash cost HTC these days like $5.00 or probably even less. But that limitation would not matter if it treated it with the SD card as one big pool.
However writing a security code to the card such that it can't be formatted on any other device just seems nucking futz crazy draconian MS lockdown.
Hey Google if your paying attention make raid storage volumes like this an OPTION in android. Just don't permanently fuxor the card to do it that would be win win.
That oughta piss of the 12 people who bought a Windows phone. In all seriousness, it's a stupid move for someone who has an insignificant fraction of the market on phones and is trying to get back into the market they totally sucked before.
This may prove enlightening
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
No, that won't work. The disk won't even be recognized if it is locked. The disk can't be selected until it has been recognized as a valid disk. You have to tell the SD card to unlock or erase itself before it will be recognized as a disk, and Windows doesn't currently support the necessary low-level unlock and erase commands.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
considering the phone can sync with the USB cable or over WiFi i'd find the SD option to be the most cumbersome.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
the SD card for the Samsung Focus is located by the SIM card slot and does not have any such labeling. i believe the only other phone that has an SD slot is the HTC Mozart, which has the slot buried deep unter the board and is stickered to void warranty.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
Right now its everyone *but* microsoft spreading FUD. the fact is that MS was always very clear about how they would support SD cards, they didnt want to, but their OEMs forced the matter. from the beginning MS said it would not be swappable and that it would create problems. this is why most OEMs didnt add slots for SD Cards. Additionally those that did, have them internally. all carriers consider anything beyond removing the battery "not user serviceable".
Additionally they likely did it this way to meet the needs of their content providers, i'm thinking specifically of the RIAA clauses that probably exist in all the Zune pass contracts they have. Also the DRM is likely a selling point for app developers.
not that i agree with the way its been done, but MS isnt really to blame here.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
Nice idea, but it would seem that you are wrong. There are a plethora of tools available to recover the password if the original device is available to you. Otherwise, you can still wipe it, and have a perfectly good functioning card.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That was secure, as in if you are a hardware developer (or OS, if the ability was not integrated into the hardware), you would need to sign up with the SD group to get permission to decrypt it. No magic required there.
That was a problem when I was playing with "Familiar" Linux on the iPaq. At the time, they didn't have access to the required libraries, so they couldn't use SD cards. We could use MMC cards, but not SD. I gave up on it after a while, when I realized I had now put linux onto an otherwise not interesting toy.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It's not a "normal" consumer accessible slot; they're buried, and you have to disassemble the phone and void your warranty to get at it.
When has voiding our warranties ever stopped us?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Will you please go away with your facts and let us bash Microsoft already?
This being an ancient and not extensively field tested extension to SD, chances are the encryption is weak and decryption tools will pop up within weeks. Geeks and government agencies will want to be able to read what's on these cards bad enough to bother putting in the effort to crack it. What encryption is used? What kind of passwords are generated? How good is the random seed on a typical smart phone these days? How good is the software implementation for this whole key and encryption thing on those phones? This whole encryption standard was made when we couldn't crack MD5 hashes with rainbow tables in seconds and the average device using SD didn't have any real computing power to speak off. I very much doubt the encryption used is anything significant when attacked with today's hardware and knowledge.
Sod the whole "not compatible" mantra. Of course it's compatible, once we make it so. Someone will find the password generation code in the firmware of the phone. Someone will find weaknesses in that code and make the keys a whole lot more predictable. Someone will come up with the encryption method and find weaknesses in it, if it's not a known standard. I'm not giving this whole system 12 months. Then again, chances are Windows Phone 7 may not be around that long....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Some flash devices completely lose their shit when you zero them out. They actually use the on-device partition table for their own housekeeping, which is well beyond fucking idiotic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Say what now?.... If this is even possible there is something really wrong with the SD card in question...
Say what now?.... If this is even possible there is something really wrong with the SD card in question...
SD cards are designed for FAT16/FAT32 ordinary (human) file usage and sadly exFAT (they didn't get their lesson) formats with ordinary files being added/removed in a "human" basis, not automatic basis.
The trick here is the inner working of FAT where the filesystem is extremely basic and there isn't really much going on chip level when file operations take place. Deleting a file is just removing first letter of filename as far as I remember. It is couple of bytes being overwritten.
What MS did is, put a gigantic file on the memory card, not allowing chips to do their tricks (wear levelling) and add a random (it didn't have to be random!) password to mount it.
Why? Let me tell you why. Media sharing and easy backups on any operating system that reads/writes FAT (read:all). Find a person uses Nokia smart phone (or even S40), from phone's main menu there is "remove memory card" option. Use it, it will eject. That is also the point to guys who claims it is not common to remove memory card. It IS! Put it into a $10 (cheaper exist but dangerous) SD card reader. Click on "Music" directory, start playing the music on your desktop or even other brand phone.
Does your files have issues? E.g. phone reboots while reading a specific file? run chkdsk E: (generally) /f /r . Using OS X and need a backup or even duplicate? Run diskutility (dd on linux) and create image. Suspect there is a virus? Run virus check.
Reading other comments (not yours), I really started to suspect there is really something grey going on with MS Phone 7 PR team...
Well that's the issue, it's NOT supposed to be removable storage. Even if it didn't "break" teh card it still wouldn't be general purpose removable storage. The phone reformats the card along with the internal storage to create a single Volume, kind of like a RAID mirror. Taking out the card would make you lose all your data, on both the card and the internal storage. 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.
What they do is what people suggested Symbian do for years. Extend the C: via OS X'es (and others) softraid "Concatenated" disk scheme.
There is a nice (!) side effect of doing it, if one of disks are missing/corrupt from the set, it is not different from removing physical part of a real disk. Obviously you should use mirrored raid disks to build that set. ZFS being able to do such things natively without such weird mad scientist ways was one of the main (if not only) reasons why Apple was interested in ZFS.
Of course, Apple has entirely documented their filesystem even in open source so, the comparison ends there.
Windows Phone 7 is pretty much a first generation operating system. There are bound to be kinks like this. I'm sure there's some undocumented bug in Windows Phone 7 that affect its handling of flash memory. Just let this blow over a little while, it'll be fixed in short order, I'm sure.
OK, I was just answering to the "missing MBR" problem.
Unfortunately, the linked article is a bit light on details, apparently because Microsoft isn't being forthcoming with any real technical info, but it's possible no encryption is being used. Perhaps WP7 is reformatting the SD Cards with some new, undocumented, unstandardized filesystem. Perhaps it adds an incompatible 'extension' to an existing filesystem (because, you know, Microsoft *never* adds poorly documented, incompatible, unstandardized extensions to standardized technologies). Although it certainly is possible some sort of encryption is being used, we can't assume that.
You do realize there can be varying degrees of evil, right?
According to Paul Thurott, who I tend to believe when it comes to MS info, the original spec for the W phone 7 series did not include an SD card slot at all. But cell phone makers like Samsung pressured MS into adding one because they wanted to be able to build cheaper phones with less memory and then sell an "upgrade" SD card to the consumer for a higher price. I believe the Samsung Focus has less stock memory than other WP7 phones.
Of course MS caved in to these demands, but the WP7 OS integrated data approach wasn't designed for discreet storage spaces. So they had to shoehorn in the method you see here, where the OS makes the SD card part of main memory. Unfortunately, SD cards aren't designed to be used that way and they have turned out to be very unreliable in real-world testing, so MS isn't really supporting the function yet.
Subby's shitty grammar created a headline that says that Windows phone modifies MicroSD cards and warns Samsung.
Non-shitty grammar would look like this: Subject, Verb, Object.
Samsung warns Windows phone permanently modifies MicroSD cards.
This version is more direct and succinct.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
A bit like the entire Windows Phone platform...
Actually the issue is that they used Cmd 42 (SD Lock/Unlock) card; this basically disables the card unless you have the password -- you cannot reformat the card w/o the password. Basically only a few commands work while the card is locked; and until you unlock it; your stuck. You can unlock it on ANY device so it isn't locked to the device so much as the password...
See: http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdcard/pls/Simplified_Physical_Layer_Spec.pdf for the full details.
Now a good question is if the WM7 uses the same password for all roms; or if it uses a hash based on the model/serial number or if it generates a password that it stores somewhere...
So you have to download an application to program the card. That's the part of my statement about "effectively locking it out" from another device, seeing as the other device typically will not have the application/driver pre-loaded with the low level commands to see that the card has been password protected. The card ends up showing up (or not?) as junk/unusable.
Karnal
Dudes, this is no different to the old xbox 1 IDE password locks.
Any one can lock an IDE drive to the controller system.
Still an evil thing to do for xbox1, (they deserved it being hacked)
But for phones, EVIL MS again strikes, common MS, offer this as an option not a secret feature.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.