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."
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.
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.
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:
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
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!
Even if that were possible, this would be too blatant a bug to have slipped through QA.
This is Microsoft QA we are talking about here..... Vista slipped through that QA.
Nope.
Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4015/htc-surround-review-pocket-boombox/8) say:
The other interesting thing is that cards initialized on WP7 are locked to a specific device, and moreover, stop being recognized on the desktop - perhaps permanently. I took the card out of the Surround and spent considerable time trying to make it format, first on Windows, then OSX, and finally linux by trying to write zeros and random data to the disk using dd. This failed, as I only managed to get 'medium not present' errors every step of the way - in fdisk, gparted, every trick I know for really nuking storage.
So, it actually does trash the card. There may be a way around that, but if there is so far some fairly smart people have failed to find it.
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.
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.
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
Secure Digital includes DRM. See this article for more information.
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.
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.
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...
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...