Scratched CD-ROM / Sector by sector reading / SCSI command - data-recovery

I'm trying to recover data from a slightly scratched CD-ROM.
I've tested without success various free or proprietary software (the recover process couldn't even start). I tried to figure out what happened and so far and I've discovered that the size of the CD-ROM was 0. SCSI command READ CD CAPACITY returns 0 Logical Block Addresses / LBA. The CD is not empty, and was not formatted for info.
Consequently all reading access via READ CD SCSI command raise exceptions because asked LBA are out of range.
I also tried SCSI command : READ CD MSF command in order to address directly the physical addresses without considering the logical addresses. Unsuccessfully, it raises the same error out of range error based on LBA ?)
Any idea or help is welcome !
Thanks in advance.

Related

53C94 SCSI IC as target - Cannot handle WRITE(10) command from Initiator

I am building a SD card/SCSI adapter using NCR 53CF94 IC and STM32.
All goes pretty well, even manged to make my device work to some degree, i.e. accepting all basic commands and even booting from it to DOS. BUT i have a problem, when asking initiator (PC) to write something to my device , all goes well i get the block address and the data. Then i write the data to SD card and finally responding with status=0 and message=0 to complete the write command, but the initiaor never increasing the secoor number to continue to write proccess and always tries to write the first one, then after few attempts it gives error on the PC (Error writing to drive...). I can't figure it out why the initiaor is not satisfied with the GOOD status and message. Do i need to send some specific data back to the initiator ? Linke CRC ? Or there is some specific command i need to issue for 53C94 ?
Banging my head for few days now.
Need your assistance please.
Thanks !
Artiom.
I figured it out. I was writing 512 byte blocks to a 256 byte array. I'm not sure how this is related to the issue, but after fixing the size everything started to work.

PCIe UIO multi-DWORD access issues

I have an Intel FPGA PCIe endpoint. It shows up correctly in lspci and all of the lspci -vv information looks correct (memory map, IRQ, BAR0 size all look OK). I want to stream some data over BAR0 and read/write status registers inside of my IP. My host machine has an Intel x86_64 CPU and running a Debian OS.
What I"m currently doing is this:
open() call to /sys/class/uio/uio0/device/resource0 -> returns a file descriptor.
mmap 4 KB on that file descriptor with PROT_READ + PROT_WRITE protection, and MAP_SHARED flags. Offset is 0. --> returns a pointer.
In a loop, set offsets relative to the pointer to random numbers. Do this for ~1000 bytes, 4 bytes at a time. After each write to the pointer, call msync.
Read back the pointer one DWORD at a time.
Read back the pointer in bulk using memcpy.
The outcome of step #4 is that most of the data looks correct, but some is not (which is strange). The outcome of number 5 is that I get 0xffff_ffff for everything, which is even stranger.
If I try to replace step #3 with a single memset / msync sequence, the program hangs for a little while and then returns a bus error. After this, lspci states that BAR0 is disabled and I can no longer interact with it.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? It could be a HW issue, but the HW is really simple right now. I configured the FPGA to act purely as a slave device, with its read response being the registered write data coming across the BAR0 interface. The IP I am working with only has a read-response-valid line (no write response valid, somehow) which I have hard-coded to 1. Seems that burst sizes more than 1 cause some kinds of issues with the PCIe core as seen in the memcpy/memset issues, but I don't see why that would be the case.
EDIT/UPDATE:
I was able to work around this. Supposedly the MMIO is only for 32b, so writing a loop that access the pointer 32b at a time is the solution here.

How to determine what bloks are allocated for the disk device?

A lot of modern storage types use Thin provisioning to allocate blocks. I need to get Block allocation map for the disk device. There is FSCTL_GET_VOLUME_BITMAP to get volume bitmap, but it is file-system specific and I need an approach that is not FS specific.
Starting in Windows 8 Windows is sending "TRIM and Unmap" hints to storage media to track allocated blocks.
UNMAP is the SCSI command by which an application or the system can
communicate to the storage stack and the disk that a certain sector or
range of sectors are currently not in use, including sectors that were
previously in use by files that were later deleted.
So this should be possible. Unfortunately, I was unable to find Disk Management Control Code or Disk Management Function to get it. Maybe someone know know the way to get it?
Like gubblebozer made a hint - GET LBA STATUS command introduced in SBC-3 is the way to retrieve the low-level mappings from the device itself. From Thin Provisioning
The application can call the IOCTL DSM allocation routine to send the SCSI
command and retrieve the mapped or unmapped state of each slab in a particular
range. If the LBA provisioning status returned does not describe the entire
allocation range, the application sends another SCSI command to retrieve the
provisioning status of the remaining LBA range.
Looks like this can be done with the help of IOCTL_STORAGE_MANAGE_DATA_SET_ATTRIBUTES
then DEVICE_DATA_SET_LB_PROVISIONING_STATE structure will contain a bitmap of
slab allocations.

GDB find command error "warning: Unable to access x bytes of target memory at y, halting search"

I'm trying to find current flag count in KMines by using gdb. I know that I should look for memory mappings first to avoid non-existent memory locations. So I ran info proc mappings command to see the memory segments. I picked up a random memory gap (0xd27000-0x168b000) from the result and executed the find command like this: find 0x00d27000, 0x0168b000, 10
But I got the warning: Unable to access 1458 bytes of target memory at 0x168aa4f, halting search. error. Although the address 0x168aa4f is between 0xd27000 and 0x168b000, gdb says that it can't access to it. Why does this happen? What can I do to avoid this situation? Or is there a way to ignore unmapped/unaccessible memory locations?
Edit: I tried to set the value of the address 0x168aa4f to 1 and it works, so gdb can actually access that address but gives error when used with the find command. But why?
I guess I have solved my own problem, I can't believe how simple the solution was. The only thing I did was to decrease the 2nd parameter's value by one. So the code should be find 0x00d27000, 0x0168afff, 10 because linux allocates the memory by using maps in [x,y) format, so if the line in root/proc/pid/maps says something like this;
01a03000-0222a000 rw-p
The memory allocated includes 0x01a03000 but not 0x0222a000. Hope this silly mistake of mine helps someone :D
Edit: The root of the problem is the algorithm implemented in target.c(gdb's source code I mean) the algorithm reads and searches the memory as chunks at the size of 16000 bytes. So even if the last byte of the chunk is invalid, gdb will throw the entire chunk into the trash and won't even give any proper information about the invalid byte, it only reports the beginning of the current chunk.

How do they read clusters/cylinders/sectors from the disk?

I needed to recover the partition table I deleted accidentally. I used an application named TestDisk. Its simply mind blowing. I reads each cylinder from the disk. I've seen similar such applications which work with MBR & partitioning.
I'm curious.
How do they read
clusters/cylinders/sectors from the
disk? Is there some kind of API for this?
Is it again OS dependent? If so whats the way to for Linux & for windows?
EDIT:
Well, I'm not just curious I want a hands on experience. I want to write a simple application which displays each LBA.
Cylinders and sectors (wiki explanation) are largely obsoleted by the newer LBA (logical block addressing) scheme for addressing drives.
If you're curious about the history, use the Wikipedia article as a starting point. If you're just wondering how it works now, code is expected to simply use the LBA address (which works largely the same way as a file does - a linear array of bytes arranged in blocks)
It's easy due to the magic of *nix special device files. You can open and read /dev/sda the same way you'd read any other file.
Just use open, lseek, read, write (or pread, pwrite). If you want to make sure you're physically fetching data from a drive and not from kernel buffers you can open with the flag O_DIRECT (though you must perform aligned reads/writes of 512 byte chunks for this to work).
For *nix, there have been already answers (/dev directory); for Windows, there are the special objects \\.\PhisicalDriveX, with X as the number of the drive, which can be opened using the normal CreateFile API. To actually perform reads or writes you have then to use the DeviceIoControl function.
More info can be found in "Physical Disks and Volumes" section of the CreateFile API documentation.
I'm the OP. I'm combining Eric Seppanen's & Matteo Italia's answers to make it complete.
*NIX Platforms:
It's easy due to the magic of *nix special device files. You can open and read /dev/sda the same way you'd read any other file.
Just use open, lseek, read, write (or pread, pwrite). If you want to make sure you're physically fetching data from a drive and not from kernel buffers you can open with the flag O_DIRECT (though you must perform aligned reads/writes of 512 byte chunks for this to work).
Windows Platform
For Windows, there are the special objects \\.\PhisicalDriveX, with X as the number of the drive, which can be opened using the normal CreateFile API. To perform reads or writes simply call ReadFile and WriteFile (buffer must be aligned on sector size).
More info can be found in "Physical Disks and Volumes" section of the CreateFile API documentation.
Alternatively you can also you DeviceIoControl function which sends a control code directly to a specified device driver, causing the corresponding device to perform the corresponding operation.
On linux, as root, you can save your MBR like this (Assuming you drive is /dev/sda):
dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr bs=512 count=1
If you wanted to read 1Mb from you drive, starting at the 10th MB:
dd if=/dev/sda of=1Mb bs=1Mb count=1 skip=10

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