Flashnul 1.0 rc2 (0.995)

Flashnul is a program for diagnosing and correcting software errors of Flash drives.

Removable media based on flash memory (such as USB-flash drives, SD, MMC, MS,XD, MD, CompactFlash, etc) due to a number of features (hot-plug connection, exposure to static, moisture, temperature, mechanical influences during transportation, natural wear due to a limited number of read cycles/records) fail relatively often.

And if simple defects do not seem to be detected, recording errors are detected relatively simply, then the diagnosis of more complex defects is a very non-trivial task. To solve this problem, the Flashnul utility was created.

List of operations performed:

• Read test - checking the availability of each sector of the media (duplicates the functionality of conventional HDD tests)
• Write test - checking the possibility of recording each sector of the media (duplicates the functionality of most HDD tests)
• The test of the safety of recorded information is a check of the correspondence of recorded and read information (similar to the functionality of memtest, but with respect to flash drives).
• Saving an image of the device content is a sector-by-sector saving of all (or part of) the content to a file. (similar to the dd functionality from UNIX).
• Uploading an image to a device is a sector-by-sector recording of an image to a device (similar to the dd functionality from UNIX).

All tests are performed at the abstraction level of block devices and can be applied to other types of media (floppy, HDD, CD, etc).