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Hidden ports and manufacturer's commands... what else was hiding in this black box?
Routers, smartphones and motherboards regularly receive firmware updates, and hard drives are usually left alone. The working system drive is easy to turn into a non-working device, and for everyday tasks, a simple result is expected from the disk: reading and writing data without surprises. The researcher I Code 4 Coffee decided to take on this adventure for the sake of the project for the operation of the Xbox 360 and decided to check whether it is possible to change the firmware of HDD for its own tasks.
The work began with three hard drives and one SSD. It quickly turned out that there are few fresh materials for the modification of HDD firmware. The topic is narrow, in the old discussions there are many irrelevant details, and the practical path strongly depends on the manufacturer, model and the specific version.
A good starting point was the files of firmware, removed with the help of PC-3000, a professional complex for diagnosing and restoring data from drives. Ready-made images allow you to study the internal disk code without trying to immediately record changes to the device, risking its performance.
Further research went to the level of service mechanisms of the drive. In the firmware there were closed teams of manufacturers designed to be serviced and diagnose. Some discs found connections to the RS-232 diagnostic port. Through this interface, you can get official information and work with the drive deeper than through the usual SATA connection.
Special access to the firmware gives JTAG. This interface is used for hardware debugging: through it you can read the memory, stop the execution of the code and monitor the operation of the disc microcontroller from the inside. For reverse-engineering HDD, such access is especially important because there is little open documentation, and the logic of the drive has to be restored on individual grounds.
The project showed not a ready-made recipe for mass flashing of hard disks, but a route to the internal mechanisms of the device. On the part of the HDD looks like a simple storage, but the inside works its own controller, service logic, closed commands and diagnostic interfaces. Therefore, experiments with the firmware of the drive remain a risky task: one error can disable the disk, and there are no clear instructions for most models.
Routers, smartphones and motherboards regularly receive firmware updates, and hard drives are usually left alone. The working system drive is easy to turn into a non-working device, and for everyday tasks, a simple result is expected from the disk: reading and writing data without surprises. The researcher I Code 4 Coffee decided to take on this adventure for the sake of the project for the operation of the Xbox 360 and decided to check whether it is possible to change the firmware of HDD for its own tasks.
The work began with three hard drives and one SSD. It quickly turned out that there are few fresh materials for the modification of HDD firmware. The topic is narrow, in the old discussions there are many irrelevant details, and the practical path strongly depends on the manufacturer, model and the specific version.
A good starting point was the files of firmware, removed with the help of PC-3000, a professional complex for diagnosing and restoring data from drives. Ready-made images allow you to study the internal disk code without trying to immediately record changes to the device, risking its performance.
Further research went to the level of service mechanisms of the drive. In the firmware there were closed teams of manufacturers designed to be serviced and diagnose. Some discs found connections to the RS-232 diagnostic port. Through this interface, you can get official information and work with the drive deeper than through the usual SATA connection.
Special access to the firmware gives JTAG. This interface is used for hardware debugging: through it you can read the memory, stop the execution of the code and monitor the operation of the disc microcontroller from the inside. For reverse-engineering HDD, such access is especially important because there is little open documentation, and the logic of the drive has to be restored on individual grounds.
The project showed not a ready-made recipe for mass flashing of hard disks, but a route to the internal mechanisms of the device. On the part of the HDD looks like a simple storage, but the inside works its own controller, service logic, closed commands and diagnostic interfaces. Therefore, experiments with the firmware of the drive remain a risky task: one error can disable the disk, and there are no clear instructions for most models.
