Memory Card Explorer for the Elan P423

[Glen Slick]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2022 at 4:58 PM Jonathan Chapman <lists at glitchwrks.com> wrote:
>
> > I ended up getting a PCI bus PC Card adapter based on the TI PCI1131
> > PCI-TO-CARDBUS CONTROLLER UNIT chip. I set that up in a Linux system
> > and eventually managed to get some MTD (Memory Technology Devices)
> > software installed so that I could read and write to a variety of
> > linear flash cards.
>
> Careful doing this, always flip the write protect switch! Default behavior, when the kernel/pcmcia-utils is trying to figure out what's in the slot is to run down a list of identification steps. The final one is to scribble on the card's memory space to see if it's writable SRAM! Blasted a card just by inserting it a few years ago, fortunately one I already had backups of.
>
> If you don't wish to futz with expensive commercial software or rolling your own, you can almost certainly use the Data I/O card utils with a generic ISA to PCMCIA adapter. I have their actual branded hardware, and it's a Vadem PCMCIA chip that follows whatever the early Intel standard was. Software is available on the Data I/O groups.io file archive. The Data I/O software includes basically "dd for Flash cards."
>
> Thanks,
> Jonathan

Not all of the linear flash cards I have on hand have write-protect
switches. I would be somewhat surprised if a card identification probe
could unintentionally write to a linear flash card. All of the linear
flash cards that I have looked at require specific command sequences
to be sent to the flash to enter programming mode, or to erase blocks.
Writing random data to the flash address space wouldn't do anything,
unless the random data just happened to match the programming command
sequence.

I'll have to boot up again the Linux system I had set up for this and
refresh my memory on some of the details. If I remember correctly, one
of the things I had to do was to rebuild the pcmcia driver with the
CONFIG_MTD_PCMCIA_ANONYMOUS option enabled. Some of the linear flash
cards I have might not have a separate attribute memory plane and no
valid CIS, so the card wouldn't get recognized without that option
enabled. Pretty sure there was something else I had to change to get
things to work with some of the cards I have. Just don't remember now.

I'll have to take a look at the Data I/O card utils sometime. Didn't
know that was a thing.

I also have a PC Card adapter for my BP Microsystems device
programmers. Unfortunately the supported device list is rather
limited.