Help formating a promotional usb flash drive

[freebird73717]

edit
Solved!
See my last post

My wife was given a promotional usb flash drive from the hospital that she is doing her clinicals at (RN School). It's set up similar to a U3 drive where when it's inserted it shows a CD drive containing some webpages, pdfs, and software, and then another drive containing the leftover useable read/write space.

For the life of me I can't seem to format this thing to gain access to the whole drive. The drive is not worth much as it's just a 1gb. Still I'd like to make use of it.

Tried formatting in diskmanagement through windows. Also tried using gparted in linux. No go. They all see the leftover space but not the space that looks like a cd.

Anyone have any ideas on how to format this.

[aedipuss]

try disc management to delete both partitions first and then format as one drive.

[freebird73717]

Won't let me delete the partition of either one in disk management.

I was really shocked that I couldn't do it with gparted in linux either.

[aedipuss]

yeah that's weird. it must have a physical write lock they used before encasing it. like on an sd card. are any of the files on the "cd" portion deletable?

[tomwil]

Usually there is software on the drive that allows the U3 partition to be deleted. Of course, all of the contents of that partition gets deleted also.

[freebird73717]

Nope. They are all read only. Can't even change them to read/write in linux.

While this is similar to U3 it is definitely not U3. Just for the heck of it I actually tried using the U3 uninstall tool on it. Didn't even recognize the drive.

Oh well. I'll keep messing with it. Maybe I can come up with something.

[aedipuss]

can't verify if it works but the apacer handy steno repair tool is reported to be able to format stubborn pen drives. it's on the apacer web site if you search in downloads.

[juststarting]

SwissKnife (freeware) was able to format a locked usb drive for me.

[freebird73717]

SwissKnife looks like a useful program. Didn't work in this case but thanks for mentioning it. I'm about done with this. Doesn't look like there is going to be any way to do this. Thanks guys for the suggestions.

[freebird73717]

I actually got this solved. I was able to do basically flash the drive's firmware and got rid of the cdfs partition. I used chipgenius to get the exact make of the chip in the usb key.
http://www.mydigit.cn/mytool/ChipGenius.rar

Then I did a search on http://www.fixfakeflash.wordpress.com/ to find the correct tool to fix the drive. The chip in this drive is an alcor au6983 chip. I searched the above site for au6983 and found the correct tool (for me it was alcorMP) to fix this drive. After running the tool I booted into linux and used gparted to delete the partitions on the flash drive then created a new partition and formatted the drive fat32 using all the space. I now have a fully functioning 1gig flash drive without having to deal with that autorun cdfs partition.

[jimdagys]

booted into linux and used gparted

Why was it necessary to boot into Linux? Could you have done the last part in Windows? Since you were successful, please explain (everything) in more detail.

[freebird73717]

1. Use Chipgenius



2. Search for your chip part number in the search box located on the right hand side of this page

3. If your lucky your search will come up with a post about your particular chip that will walk you through what tool you need and how to use it.

Can't give any more specific answer than that because different controller chips for different usb drives will require a different tool to fix them.

As far as the reformating goes I prefer using gparted for any formatting. I suppose you probably could use disk management in windows to delete the partitions and reformat. I just prefer gparted.

[jimdagys]

Thanks for the info. Might be useful someday.
Kind of curious what you do when you get to this screen.

[lordsmurf]

Guess.

[jimdagys]

I admire your ability to navigate through a Chinese website. I asked some local Chinese to try to help me based on the info you gave me and they were stumped. My question is ( in addition to the last question): Why would you bother to post a solution that 99.9999999% of native English speakers could not follow?
EDIT: In the above screenshot, you can see 3 split rars. I'm not sure what they are (some kind of tool?), but when I try to download them, I am directed to another Chinese page that says I need to be registered (by invitation only) before I can download the 3 rars.
You said that

Can't give any more specific answer than that because different controller chips for different usb drives will require a different tool to fix them.

but if you could give more details (with a screenshot or two) how you fixed YOUR particular USB flashdrive, that would be very interesting and helpful reading.

[AlanHK]

Thanks for the info. Might be useful someday.
Kind of curious what you do when you get to this screen.

Use Google translate and you can see the "Click here to download page" link at the bottom.
In turn that page has another link labelled "To the download page" which is the actual RAR file.

but if you could give more details (with a screenshot or two) how you fixed YOUR particular USB flashdrive, that would be very interesting and helpful reading.

Again, Google for "ChipGenius" and will find several pages explaining (in English) how to do this.
This exercise left to the student.

[jimdagys]

I was hoping the original poster would come back and give more screenshots and detailed info.
However I found this on the web:
http://agnipulse.com/2010/04/how-i-fixed-a-fake-64gb-usb-drive/
that does have some useful screenshots with explanations how to repair a fake USB flash drive.
On the above link, you can see from the second screenshot that there many confusing options, but I guess everything is left to the default options. I suppose the same (or slightly modified) software could be used to make a USB flash report in Windows that the USB capacity is larger than it really is. I wouldn't mind as an experiment to try to make my 1GB USB into a 64 GB USB. I could earn some pocket money.
From:
http://fixfakeflash.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/fc8308-vid-0001-pid-7778-repair-fake-flas...rive-solution/

This explains how they are counterfeiting the devices, just set CAP to 8GB and a device that is 2 GB, after low level formatting, magically becomes 8GB! (I tryed and it works!)

[sunshinekhan]

Dear All,

I have a promotional 2Gb Tohsiba Drive, that initially had a small UDF partition (about 11Mb) and a regular FAT (about 1.88Gb).

With all little reading around and looking for solution I used Chip Genius to identify the chip on the drive, SM3252A Memory Bar with a SM3211BC1 Chip.

I found the SMI Mass Production Tool (v 1.17.69 v4 08/28 build) relevant to the Chip from a Russian website and did the following:

1. Multiple Erase All selecting the contents on Port 1 and 2, without changing any settings (screenshot not shown).

2. Then running the tool once with the default.ini configuration, erasing bad blocks (screenshot not shown).

Now what I have is a Removable drive with 44Mb capacity, seen either as 44M or as 2048M.

Can anyone please guide me with the settings so that I might reclaim the UFD for normal use.

I'll make myself available for anyother details. Thanking you in anticipation.

Ragards ~ sunshinekhan

I have attached some screenshots (one with the default setting windows).

[TeacherMac]

Looks like everyone posting here has had malicious malware installed when they used ChipGenius ALL VERSIONS!!!!

From China of course!


Mac

[AlanHK]

Looks like everyone posting here has had malicious malwareinstalled when they used ChipGenius ALL VERSIONS!!!!
From China of course!
Mac

How do you deduce that?