Translation tables are a dynamic component of HDD firmware that translate logical addresses to physical locations on the disk. Corrupted translators can be the cause of drive failures in drives that appear undamaged and are without physical trauma. That failure can be reversed in many cases. We will present ways to identify if a drive's translator has been corrupted for the Moose & Pharaoh drive families specifically, how to force a translator rebuild, and open source tool(s) to help you repair the translator.

Data recovery is a notoriously secretive field. Very little information about firmware and its internal data structures is public. Knowledge should be open source. By sharing what we've learned we hope to open this field up to more people, encourage repair, encourage re-use rather than disposal of hard drives, and encourage further publicly shared research. After the talk, attendees should be able to fix this type of error themselves in HDDs of the appropriate families using a TTL converter and the supplied code. Familiarity with the basic components of hard drive firmware is helpful, but not required.

Bio
MrDe4d is the lead Data Recovery Engineer and founder of Revenant Data Recovery. She is also a hobbyist embedded systems security researcher. She leads local workshops in Binary and Assembly CTF challenges. She has presented at conferences such as HushCon and Teardown, as well as at other hackerspaces around the USA. In 2017 she co-founded PASCAL Hackerspace and in 2019 co-founded the QultoftheQuantumQapybaras CTF team. She is passionate about learning, freedom of information, promoting self-advocacy, and hacking the planet!

Allison Marie Naaktgeboren is a Software Engineer with security roots at Signal Sciences. She has written and regretted code at Mozilla, Amazon, Cisco, FactSet Research Systems, and the Biorobotics Laboratory of the Robotics Institute. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Allison leads classes on computer science fundamentals, cofounded & captains the QultoftheQuantumQapybaras CTF team, and mentors disadvantaged high school students in robotics, software, and hardware hacking.