Collaborate Disseminate
Sometimes, you know where the data you need is stored, you just don’t have a way to access it. In this case, [GetHypoxic] needed to rip data off an eMMC …read more Continue reading Dumping An eMMC Chip With Many Bodge Wires
An increasing phenomenon over the years since mobile phones morphed from simply telephones into general purpose pocket computers has been that of the dead device taking with it some treasured …read more Continue reading An eMMC Gives Up Its Secrets
It is no secret that we like a good hack and [Federico Amedeo Izzo] explains a hack for the PinePhone that can double the speed used for the device’s memory …read more Continue reading PinePhone Speed Up Takes Soldering
It’s a problem familiar to anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time playing with a Raspberry Pi – over time, the flash in the SD card reaches its write cycle limits, and causes a cavalcade of confusing errors before …read more
Continue reading Tesla Recalls Cars With eMMC Failures, Calls Part a ‘Wear Item’
Now that November of 2019 has passed, it’s a shame that some of the predictions made in Blade Runner for this future haven’t yet come true. Oh sure, 109 million people living in Los Angeles would be fun and all, but until we get our flying cars, we’ll just have …read more
Not every computer is a performance gaming rig. Some of us need cheap laptops and tablets for simple Internet browsing or word processing, and we don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars just for that. With a cheaper price tag comes cheaper hardware, though, such as the eMMC standard which allows flash memory to be used in a more cost-advantageous way than SSDs. For a look at some the finer points of eMMC chips, we’ll turn to [Jason]’s latest project.
[Jason] had a few damaged eMMC storage chips and wanted to try to repair them. The most common failure …read more
Every once in a while, and more so now than before, you’ll find a really neat chip with zero documentation. In [David]’s case, it’s a really cool USB 3.0 eMMC/ SD MMC controller. Use this chip, attach a USB port on one end, and some memory on the other, and you have a complete bridge. There are drivers, too. There are products shipping with this chip. The problem is, there is no data sheet. Wanting to use this chip, [David] turned to sandpaper to figure out the pinout of this chip.
The best example of a product that came with …read more
We’ve probably all got at least one old cell phone lurking somewhere around our bench. In most cases they’ll still work, but their batteries may be exhausted and their OS could be an ancient version. But sometimes there will be a phone that just died. One minute the flagship model, the next a useless slab of plastic and glass with the added annoyance of those priceless photos of Aunty May’s 80th forever locked in its memory.
[Andras Kabai] had just such a device land on his desk, a high-end Sony whose screen had gone blank. Others had tried, he was …read more
What happens when you drop your laptop in the pool? Well, yes, you buy a new laptop. But what about your data. You do have backups, right? No, of course, you don’t. But if you can solder like [TheRasteri] you could wire into the flash memory on the motherboard and read it one last time. You can see the whole exploit in the video below.
There’s really three tasks involved. First is finding the schematic and board layout for motherboard. Apparently, these aren’t usually available from the manufacturer but can be acquired in some of the seedier parts of the …read more
Continue reading Soldering Saves Data From Waterlogged Laptop
[Jason Gin] recently wrote in to tell us about his adventures replacing the eMMC storage chip on a cheap Windows tablet, and we have to say, it’s an impressive amount of work for a device which apparently only cost him $15. Surely much better pieces of hardware have been tossed in the trash for less serious failures than what ailed his DigiLand DL801W tablet. We’d love to see the lengths this guy would go to restore something a bit higher up the food chain.
As any good hacker knows, you can’t fix the problem until you understand it. So the …read more
Continue reading Hot Air Surgery Revives a Cheap Windows Tablet