With "modern" hardware are there currently any notable instances where a
failed read of a hardware storage area block results in that missing
data being filled in with something other than null bytes? For
I'm surprised at the question: I expect failed reads to result in
out-of-band errors, not zeros. a failed read on a disk, for instance,
indicates that the ECC failed - considering that the ECC is quite
strong, it would be surprising to encounter a failure which wasn't
even detected by the ECC.
on what kind of medium are you finding errors-returned-as-zero?
a region of a DVD goes bad. (Assuming that the software reading it can
even go on beyond the failure, which is often not possible, for instance
on many tapes.)
I know it's sorta possible to read raw (extended) sectors from disks,
but it's pretty deep voodoo. I guess I would expect the contents to
not fail-to-zero on disks (which I guess use some kind of NRZ-like encoding).
I wouldn't be surprised if damaged flash would read all-0 or all-1
(flash erase sets a block to all-1, right, and writing is basically
clearing selective zeros?)
will fill in with null bytes, but there is a lot of other software out
there...
I think it's a question of whether you're using an exotic interface
or not - normal kernel block/char devices aren't ever going to do this.
people in the forensics/recovery business would be the ones to ask.
-mark hahn
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