Ricoh Mp 2510 SD Card Reply Urgent

[Polarbear]

I believe that Ricoh places a low level marker file on their SD cards that identifies the card to the machine as an options firmware card. Without this, the machine will not accept the firmware. This is for Copywrite protection. If you move an option from one card to another, you have to store the SD as proof that you have purchased the option. If at sometime in the future you want to remove the option, you have to move the firmware back to the original SD card. If you format or write to the SD card in any way on a computer, the MFP will no longer recognize it as a firmware card. The only exception is the JAVA VM card. You are allowed to upgrade the VM firmware on a PC using Ricoh's update utility. If you try to just copy the update to the VM card without using the update utility, the card becomes useless.

+1 on the low level marker theory.

I think they write these cards with operating system other than Windows, like Linux or such. I did some homework on SD card security and Windows, and Windows will write things to any SD card, that the Ricoh machines will not like.

[rthonpm]

+1 on the low level marker theory.

I think they write these cards with operating system other than Windows, like Linux or such. I did some homework on SD card security and Windows, and Windows will write things to any SD card, that the Ricoh machines will not like.

The copier OS is NetBSD when you break it all down so it would be something that a Unix OS could read that Windows doesn't see. I'd venture to guess that there's a part of the boot manager for the machine that writes a key string to the card that signs it for that particular device.

Think of it like encrypting an SD card on your phone: if you put that card into another phone of the same model, it won't be able to decrypt it since the new phone is using a different key hash.