On Console Format

On-Console Format

This page describes a feature that is no longer in the normal build.

The on-console formatter — hold LT, optionally with RT and LB — now exists only in the debug build. See Two Builds for why, and Capacity Unlock for what replaced the part of it people actually wanted.

What to do instead

To prepare any drive: put it in, run the exploit, and format it from the console.

System Settings → Storage → Hard Drive → Format

The bypass mounts the drive whatever was on it before — NTFS, FAT32, a Windows install, nothing at all — and the console then writes a layout that is correct by definition, because its own kernel is the thing the layout has to satisfy. FATXplorer on a PC works just as well.

To reach the hidden capacity of an SSD Maker drive: hold LB while the exploit runs. See Capacity Unlock.

Why the formatter went away

Writing FATX volumes from the plugin means choosing the layout ourselves: cluster size, allocation table size, where the data area starts, what a system partition has to contain. Every one of those is a guess that has to stay correct, on someone else's drive, with their data on it. The console does not guess.

The three modes it offered were:

Held	What it did
LT	Wiped the security sector and formatted for the whole drive
LT + RT	Kept the security sector, formatted at the flashed size
LT + RT + LB	Kept the security sector, formatted for full capacity with a BSTOR marker

The third one is the only one that did something the console cannot, and Capacity Unlock now does that without writing anything to the disk at all.

The one thing worth keeping from this page

A drive already flashed by SSD Maker can be returned to an unauthenticated one without its undo.bin, by zeroing the security sector at offset 0x2000 — 512 bytes, outside every FATX partition, since the first one starts at 0x80000. From Linux:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 seek=16 count=1

After that the drive stops authenticating, falls to the bypass path, and its capacity comes from the hardware rather than from the identity it was flashed with. The cost is the disk key, and with it avatars — see Scope and Limitations.