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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.
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.
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.
But what appears to have fried our card is the fact that any card inserted into a Windows Phone 7 device "will no longer be readable or writable on any other devices such as computers, cameras, printers, and so on" according to documentation on Samsung's site -- including, amazingly, the ability to format the card.
Sounds like the card is being "permanently modified" (and not for the better) to me.
From Microsoft's KB2450831 support article:
Extra! Extra! Slashdotter vows to avoid Microsoft product! Read all about it!
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.
This information alone means that I'll avoid ever getting a Windows phone, even if it should have tremendous advantages otherwise.
Why? Because of a hyperbole laden /. thread? That's a terrible reason to decide anything.
There is a warning on the phone. There is clear documentation that this will happen. The slot is not designed for convenient insertion/removal. It is not intended to be used as a portable storage.
It is intended to be a permanent expansion module for the phone, not removal SD storage.
Let me ask you this: Suppose they didn't use an SD card slot. Suppose they had instead developed a proprietary connector instead and sold the expansion as proprietary modules that had to be installed at a service center. Would that trigger the same sort of averse reaction from you?
I'm curious, because if you wanted to upgrade your 16GB iPhone to 32GB that's essentially the process assuming you could even get it done... do you avoid iPhones because of that?
MS is using the SD form factor for this because it meets their needs, and using an existing form factor reduces engineering and manufacturing costs. Don't think of it as 'SD removal storage' and think of it as an upgrade kit that just happens use the SD form factor. Honestly, most consumers will likely never even use the functionality at all. And for those few that do decide to expand their phone this way, it requires very specific SD cards, and its well documented that its a permanent upgrade using SD form factor and not plug/play removal storage.
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.
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.
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
The SD card in question is not supposed to be a removable peice of the device. some phones even have it soldered in. Others have labels on it saying removing it voids your warranty. It may be an SD card but in this case it is the equivalent to prying a chip off the board and replacing it with your own and being pissed that it didn't work.
To Joe Blow the SD card in question is completely inaccessible, even soldered in on some models in others it is under the board itself and requires considerable effort to even find it let alone replace it. There is no way the average person will mistakenly replace the SD card in question.
To ignore any of these points regarding the consumer is just painting a big red failure sign on the barn.
Its physically located under the battery, and its covered by a sticker with a warning on it. The sticker on the one I saw you had to cut through to actually insert a card, there was a prominent warning on it, and it mentioned voiding your warranty.)
Its not like there its on the side of the phone wide open and ready to receive media.
You are right that there will be some JoeBlow out there with just enough tech-savvy to find and recognize the card slot, and enough recklessness to cut through the sticker and jam the first thing he can find that will fit into it...
That's NOT going to be your average user. That's going to that same class of idiot that randomly sticks ram modules into their motherboards without regard to whether the motherboard will accept that particular speed or configuration. The kind who tries sharing his printer by plugging it into the usb port on his PVR, the kind who has his entire living room plugged into a bar plugged into a power bar plugged into a power bar. The kind who have their cable modem plugged into a LAN port on their router, the kind who plug their TV into their PVR using an HDMI to DVI adapter and wonder why their is no sound only to then plug in a set of composite cables and watch everything on the composite input "in HD".
I know people like that. There's one at the office... he was excited to find an old motorola 9-pin serial to RJ-45 adapter used to program certain 2-way radios. Why was this a big deal? He also had a USB-serial device used for old blackberrys. He figured he'd be able to use his ipod as a network attached storage. The missing link... a male-male usb adapter. Luckily... he had a USB hub he wasn't using. Game-set-match! (True story.)
Since when do we at slashdot really concern ourselves about the fate of these people?
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.