Hi everyone... I'm trying to do some data recovery on my tablet. It's an Android Nexus 7 which has something like Hynix H26M64002DQR as its NAND Flash RAM. If I pay a data recovery company, it would cost quite a bit. So I'm thinking of doing the recovery myself as a hobbyist.

If I desolder the memory chip I should be able to get the data from it, but how will I read the chip? One data recovery company I spoke with described this "chip-off" recovery as a process they offer. I've tried googling for chip readers but could only find large and very expensive readers which are made for reading many types of chips. Is there a way I could either:

1. Wire up something myself ... Find a socket which will hold the NAND chip, design and build a simple reader board and connect it to my computer.

2. Or, buy an inexpensive chip reader (if it exists?) and pull the data off using it.

Any thoughts from the community? Thanks!

 

Hi everyone... I'm trying to do some data recovery on my tablet. It's an Android Nexus 7 which has something like Hynix H26M64002DQR as its NAND Flash RAM. If I pay a data recovery company, it would cost quite a bit. So I'm thinking of doing the recovery myself as a hobbyist.

If I desolder the memory chip I should be able to get the data from it, but how will I read the chip? One data recovery company I spoke with described this "chip-off" recovery as a process they offer. I've tried googling for chip readers but could only find large and very expensive readers which are made for reading many types of chips. Is there a way I could either:

t
1. Wire up something myself ... Find a socket which will hold the NAND chip, design and build a simple reader board and connect it to my computer.

2. Or, buy an inexpensive chip reader (if it exists?) and pull the data off using it.

Any thoughts from the community? Thanks!

167K bytes and you want to read it manually? I hope you know where what you want is.
Automated reader? Like an Arduino app? Read it all and save it to the computer as a text file for manual editing? Will it be just one long text stream if you don't know formatting? It could be done I guess.
It probably wasn't full so you won't need to do all of it. The service may be worth paying for if this is a one-time thing.
Typically you would put in serially a command word to read. I could not find a data sheet that tells me what that command looks like.

 

167K bytes and you want to read it manually? I hope you know where what you want is.
Automated reader? Like an Arduino app? Read it all and save it to the computer as a text file for manual editing? Will it be just one long text stream if you don't know formatting? It could be done I guess.
It probably wasn't full so you won't need to do all of it. The service may be worth paying for if this is a one-time thing.
Typically you would put in serially a command word to read. I could not find a data sheet that tells me what that command looks like.

It's likely either an ext4 or yaffs filesystem, in which case a binary image can be mounted on a linux system and processed normally.

I don't know how to get the image off the NANDs, though.