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.

Hello world,

My name is Nicholas Moller, from here on out nick, and I am the senior IT administrator and programer at USB Memory Direct. I started this blog to talk about all the cool things that pass through the office and my head during the day as well as my hobbies; photography, programming, and the human mind.

I have noticed a lot of people do not really know much about what they are getting when it comes to usb drives. So I have decided to talk a little bit about the different types of products you can find on the market.

Fake Flash Drives or Ghost Drives

First an foremost the infamous ghost/fake drives that are plaguing the market. A ghost drive is a flash drive that reports a false capacity, this is done purposely by the manufacturers. Manufacturers can program the controller chip to report a high capacity than what the device really is. So when you plug it in and view the drive properties it will say it is 2gb but the actual chip is only 512mb.

Once a ghost drive is filled up you won’t be able to put anymore data onto the device although your operating system will continue to try, since the device is reporting only 25% of its space is used. This behavior will result in data loss and potential system instability.

If you come across a price that seems to good to be true it most likely is. Exercise caution when purchasing from unknown vendors promising ridiculously low prices compared to the rest of the marketplace.

Detecting Ghost Drives

There is a simple program called H2testw which will fill your drive with sample data then check to see if it stored correctly.

1. Download H2testw here
2. Extract and open the program
3. Select English as the language
4. Select your target device by it’s drive letter from the My Computer submenu
5. Hit Write + Verify

A good ouput should look like this:

Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 5.38 MByte/s
Reading speed: 15.7 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

A bad output would look something like this:

Warning: Only 374 of 496 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
0 KByte OK (0 sectors)
374 MByte DATA LOST (765952 sectors)
Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
374 MByte corrupted (765952 sectors)
0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000000000000
Expected: 0x0000000000000000
Found: 0x00020000ff3f0000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 16.5 MByte/s
Reading speed: 11.8 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

• Massive write speeds, higher than the read speeds, means you are not actually putting info onto the usb.

H2testw is capable of detecting other errors but I won’t be getting into them today.

• Remember a great price does not mean a great buy always get the best value not price. Most low priced vendors use tricks like this to reduce their cost.
• We provide lifetime replacement warranties on all orders. Vendors who will not do they same should be avoided.
  

Hope this is helpful for some of you out there. I will continue next week with different chip grades.