Extracting data physically with nanddump
In all of the preceding examples, the partitions were all
Multimedia Card (MMC) blocks, which is typically seen in newer devices. Older devices, however, are far more likely to consist of
Memory Technology Device (MTD) blocks. We have seen cases in the past where the dd
command was unable to properly image an MTD block, although more often than not, it works fine. If dd
fails, there is a widely distributed utility called MTD-Utils
used to read and write from MTD blocks; the nanddump
command is a part of MTD-Utils
, and can be used similarly to dd
in order to read from an MTD block. In those cases where dd
failed, nanddump
was always successful.
Versions of nanddump
compiled for Android can be found in many places online; we used the one found at https://github.com/jakev/android-binaries/blob/master/nanddump.
The process to put nanddump
on the device is the same as the one used previously for netcat:
adb push nanddump /dev/Examiner_Folder/nanddump chmod...