Access the SD Protected Area!?

[blublob]

So, I was fiddling with a satnav I have for my boat, and became interested in how the map data was accessed.

On very old satnavs we used to have floppy disks that had the map info on them, and for a new area we had to put in a new disk.

I had made backups of those to have at home, incase well, someone messed around with them intoxicated and it flew over board (yes, that actually happened one time we used the boat as transport to an island festival, there 'might' have been beer involved..)

[According to our laws this is perfectly legal, and I believe it also recently became legal in the UK.]

After a bit of searching I figured out it is a 2gb Samsung microSD card that contains the map data.

Fine let us try dd it.

Nope, this card is 'empty' he tells me, while infact it is full/identical to the original when I check on the pc.

So I came to think that it might be something in the Protected Area that prevents the satnav from reading the microSD I created (it was also a 2gb samsung one).

Does anyone here maybe know if this is the case, and if so, is there a way for me to read this Protected Area?

(Maybe with an atmel microprocessor and an sd adapter, if the normal pc ones does not support it.)

Possible to write to such an area?