Repairing Counterfeit Flash Drives

SOSFakeFlash has been asked by many victims of fake flash drive purchases – how to restore to the original true capacity? Electrostorm has provided excellent information to the tools you would need to deprogramme FrankenFlash.

See Repairing Counterfeit Fake MP Players For MP Players.

Mentioned previously (see: Did You Manage to Reprogramme a Fake Flash Drive Bought on eBay?), to repair a drive you need to know about the controller and the flash chips. To do this you need software that will provide this information. Once you have it, you need to find the right software to reflash the chip and perform the low level formatting of the drive. We are providing the links and steps submitted by Electrostorm. Understand that this could repair a fake – but not in all cases. You could lose the drive in attempting to repair – especially if you chose the wrong tool. Not all drives can be rescued and returned to their real capacity – but many have been.

electrostorm Says:
October 25, 2008 at 4:31

To restore most fake capacity USB flash memory devices.

Step 1:

Download chipgenius, this program will automatically detect an inserted flash drive and read out the 4 digit VID code and 4 digit PID code.

http://www.mydigit.cn/mytool/ChipGenius.rar

If you don’t have a software that can unzip the “rar” format, please get the software 7-zip from:

http://www.7-zip.org/

Step 2:

Go to the iFlash website and search for a matching VID and PID, download the corresponding software from the site.

http://www.flashboot.ru/index.php?name=iflash

Translated to English (recommended)

In most cases I have been able to use the software provided to reflash the controller chip and do a low level format and restore correct capacity.

Once you have repaired the drive using the steps and software above – you need to format the drive in your operating system. After operating system formatting you should once again test the capacity of the drive to ensure that you have truly succeeded. Use the tool H2testw 1.4 once more again. If you are able to write, read and verify without errors – you now have a flash drive you can store data on. It may be a lot smaller but the capacity will be real.

If you chose to try and repair your drive using the information presented here, please return and leave your feedback indicating your success or failure in returning a drive back to it’s original capacity.

Update 20091023: Please consult the new FAQ at FixFakeFlash Inspectortech for important information on repairing fake flash memory items before you attempt to repair.