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Create image from SSD with I/O errors
(lemmy.world)
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There is no particular bit or byte that is wrong. The drive is coming from an entire 128K to megabytes-large page that it couldn't make sense of. There was already a lot of error correction code tried, and the overall analog values of the page were re-tried (was this a 14/16th millivolt, or a 15/16th millivolt?). That page couldn't be made sense of, the MLC page overlaid on it couldn't be made sense of, the TLC page overlaid on that couldn't be made sense of, etc. Or things could also be so bad that the FTL doesn't even know which flash cells your data should be found in.
Everything that I understand about flash storage suggests that it can't reasonably do little errors. You could still get small errors from a bit flip in delivery, or more likely flips in your PC's own ram. But the flash itself should either be very right, or very very wrong. Nothing in-between.
Thanks for the explanation. I don't really know how flash storage works. The fundamental idea of the problem I described would still apply, though as long as the input block size for
dd
extends to more than one page of the underlying storage.For example, say that exactly three pages fit in a block. If
dd
attempts to read pages A, B and C (ABC) and fails to read B, you would want the corresponding part zeroed in the output to preserve the offsets of all the other pages (A0C). But insteaddd
reads whatever it can for the entire block, then pads the rest of the block size with zeroes, effectively moving C forward (AC0). So essentially you magnify errors.