According to the Sandisk web site, "Write protection errors occur when a flash drive detects a potential fault within itself." This means the microSD card detected an issue with possible memory corruption so it disabled writes, so the microSD card goes into "write-protected" mode. This sounds similar to a Linux file system when it automatically remounts the disk in read-only mode when it sees an issue with the disk.
There is a video entilted "Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card" which describes how a SD memory card typically works. They mention that it has an ARM-based microcontroller in addition to the flash memory whose job is to manage the memory and write data only to the good blocks. Think of it as a mini-CPU that controls where data is to be written. In the video the researchers got the card to run code. As a result, it is possible to send a few commands to the mini-CPU to clear the write-protect status or maybe request it to rebuild the bad block table.
Unless you have specialized hardware or software, you probably won't be able to "rework" or repair the microSD card.
References:
- Sandisk
- Even tiny microSD cards have chips that can be hacked
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 03/08/2016 21:42:47
|