Recovering Broken, Unformattable, and Ghost USB Flash Drives
Welcome again. Today I am going to provide a helpful guide to recover broken USB drives, ghost drives, and drives unable to be formatted. If you are asking questions like “I can’t format my usb drive! Whats wrong?”, you may want to read on.
This guide will also aid in the recover of ghost drives and return the flash drive to it’s actual capacity.
Check to see if your drive exhibits any of these behaviors:
- Windows says “Unrecognized USB device”
- You cannot format your USB drive. The format utility also displays a capacity of 8mb no matter the size of your drive.
- Your drive status light flashes but nothing happens on the OS.
- Your drive shows up, but when you try to write, it crashes and disappears.
- Generally, your drive is not functioning correctly.
WARNING: Before you continue with this guide, be aware that, although highly unlikely, using some of the programs in this guide could possibly destroy the physical controller unit on your drive. Only proceed if this is a last resort. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IRREPARABLE DAMAGE OR LOST DATA.
First of all, a USB flash drive is comprised of two main parts – the Controller and the NAND Flash Chip. This guide is going to explain the use of a program which accesses the controller unit directly to complete formats and recoveries.
NOTE: Since this program accesses the controller unit on your flash chip, I have included 2 programs that do the same thing. Each program has a list of controller access codes. Depending on your controller, one of these access codes may or may not work.
Lets get started!
Step 1
Download the program package and extract it. You will see the programs labeled prog1 and prog2.
Step 2
Remove all your USB Flash Drives. Once you have your drives out, start up ONLY ONE program. Don’t open both! This will cause some serious system related issues.
For prog1, click the lightbulb icon. For prog2, click umptool2090.exe. Once open, both of these programs should look extremely similar.
Step 3
Plug your broken flash drive in. If you do not see the flash drive appear on the program screen or you see “UNKNOWN FLASH”, try the other program.
NOTE: If both fail to recognize your flash, unfortunately you will have to continue your search for an answer.
Step 4
When you have your drive plugged in and it is recognized by our program, click start. No other setup is required. I have preset everything to return your device to it’s original state.
WARNING: If you continuously format your drives, THEY WILL BREAK! Prog2 is notorious for breaking drives. Expect a 15%-20% fail rate. Again, I have set prog2 to minimize this as beast I could, down to ~5%.
If you would like to poke around in the settings panel, there are a lot of interesting features. One that I would suggest is “Information Tab” for prog1, and “Vendor Settings” for prog2. This controls the vendor name information which shows up on the taskbar info bubble, a cool feature to show off to your friends. Other than that, I leave it up to you to figure out the settings AT YOUR OWN RISK. Remember, the more you run the drives through the program, the greater the chance they will break.
NOTE: In program 1, you will be prompted with a password box when you click settings. Leave it blank and hit OK. If it does not allow you access, you can check the .INI file in the root directory for the password if it got changed for some reason.
If you have any questions or would like additional controller codes for prog2, leave a comment and I will respond to you. You may also leave your email addy if you would like me to respond directly to you as well as in the comment thread.
prog1 says it’s missing a loader image and closes inmediately
Try re-extracting it.
It is a peculiar issue with this program. I believe it is tied to the img file in the AUTORUN folder, although I have not confirmed it, it seems when this file is missing or damaged it triggers the error but this is not always the case. Some times when it spits out that error the program will continue on loading I guess it all depends.
In any event a re-extraction in most cases solves the problem.
-nick
Hi,
Prog1 alert me “NO LOADER IMG FILE”. Some dll files in DLL folder have fail (Except SETUP_DLL.DLL).
In prog2 nothing happend when i attach USB drive. My Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 is not recognized in any OS. How to resolve this problem?
Thanks.
What Juancho said. prog2 doesn’t do anything when I plug it in, it just sits there.
Again this is the same error. Not really sure what triggers it. The error occurred for me a while back and after clicking okay the program continued to open.
If you flash drive does not show up then your controller does not match the program. The two controller manufactures which these programs are from are Alcor Micro and Chipsbank.
Chipsbank is one of the worst in the industry, which is why I uploaded this program, most erroneous drives have the chipsbank controller.
The Alcor program I just happened across so I also decided to upload it.
I have about 40 off these annoying little programs here at my office. Most of our drives use USBest controllers. Rarely we will see chipsbank controllers float through.
Good Luck. If you would like you can tell me what controller manufacturer your drive uses and I will let you know if I have the appropriate program.
-Nick
thanks for this programme used program 2 & saved having to throw my new disc away
got the missing loader image error, too. opened the .ini file. the program looks for C:\9384.img.
1. I copied the Reserve.img from the installed folder AUTORUN, put it into both installation root and directly under C:\ (for good measure)
2. Renamed the file to 9384.img
3. Started the .exe, and it loaded up fine
Thanks! You saved my pendrive with prog2
Would this method work with a SanDisk Cruzer 2GB? This seems to be my last hope.
No luck at all with a Kingston DataTraveller II,
It only sees ~50mb of a 512 stick. Any help would be appreciated.
Running WinXP sp3
The app doesn’t see it at all
Hello,
Just to further clarify a few things. If your drive does not show up with these programs it is not the end of the world, it just means the program does not recognize your controller. Keep searching for similar programs around the web. Also if you have the heart to open up your drive and read the controller name then that should help in your search.
I will continue to attempt and find the codes/programs which people request but without having the drives handy it will be hard. Always remember flash is not meant for storage but for transport. Never trust critical data to any flash drive, or any ONE hard drive.
-Nick
Hi Nick
Is there any chance you have the programs for a SanDisk SDYNLNDHSP-016G. Would really appreciate you help.
Thanks
Chris,
I searched the web quickly and all I could find is a utility that works for compact flash.
If I find anything that works on sandisk I’ll be sure to post an update.
Sorry
Hi nick,
I am downloading the program right now and i’ll try it after.
Ahhm, one thing..the comments are very necessary to read before the downloading of the progs.rar, but it is more informative if you will put the date on each of every comments when it was posted.
Thank you very much! More Power man!
Thank you very much for your prog1, was really helpful saved my 32gb kingston
happy newyear
Hi Nick,
When I am trying to fix my 4GB IBALL USB drive, it is getting detected by prog1 but showing up following error against it:
20000: Invalid device error
Bad Block: 0/0
Start and other options are disabled, any idea what can I do to fix it?
Thanks:
Amit.
Dear,
When i clicked on start button,
it shows below error
C0000:Read bad Block table error
Bad Block:0/8192
Dear,
When i clicked on start button with Prog 1
it shows below error
C0000:Read bad Block table error
Bad Block:0/8192
Please help
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your support here. I tried all of the above, but no luck. I purchased a 16gb LGear from FutureShop. Now I have the same problem, and I am trying to recover my data. Do you have any suggested software at this point?
Thank you,