Alcor USB Flash Drive Tools - Fix Fake USB Drives .rar
Kathryn Garivay
This was a brand new, generic, 8GB flash drive I wanted to create a multiboot flash drive with. It came formatted as FAT32, though oddly a little larger than most 8 GIGAbyte flash drives I've come across. Approximately 127MB was listed as "used" by Windows. I never discovered why. The end usable space was about what I normally expect from a 8GB drive (approx 7.4 GIBIbytes).
A few days later, I took some time to take that odd video option off, making the boot command match the one that comes with Knoppix. On the attempt to boot, Knoppix reported some form of LZMA corruption.
I was thinking the Knoppix files may have been corrupted somehow, so I tried reloading it. The drive was nearly full (45MB free), so I deleted a generic ISO that also was not booting. That went fine. I then went through YUMI to 'uninstall' Knoppix, i.e. delete files and remove from the menus. The files went first, then the menus were cleared successfully. However, the free space was stuck at about 700MB, same as it was before removing Knoppix. In the old Knoppix folder, there was a 0 byte file named KNOPPIX that could not be deleted.
I tried reinserting the drive to delete this file - without safely removing, if that made a difference (hey, first time for everything). Running the standard Windows chkdsk scan without /r or /f reported errors found. Running with /r just got it stuck.
I decided to give fsck a shot, so I loaded up my Kubuntu VM and attached the drive to it with VirtualBox's USB 2.0 passthrough. I umounted it (/dev/sda1) and ran a fsck. There are differences between boot sector and its backup. I chose No action. It told me FATs differ and asked me to select either the first or second FAT. Whichever I selected, I got a notice of Free cluster summary wrong. If I chose Correct, it gave a list of incorrect file names. To try to fix something, at least, I ran it with the -p option. Halfway through fixing the files, the VM froze - I ended its process about ten minutes later.
My next attempt was to use YUMI, again, to rebuild the whole drive. I used YUMI's built in reformat (to FAT32) option and installed a Kubuntu ISO (700MB). The format was successful, however, the extract and copy of Kubuntu (which YUMI uses a 7zip binary for) froze at about 60% done. After waiting for about fifteen minutes (longer than the 3.5GB Knoppix ISO took last time), I pulled the drive out. The drive at this point was already formatted, SYSLINUX already installed, just waiting on the unpacking of an ISO and the modifying of the boot menus.
Plugging it back in, it came up as normal - however, any write action would fail. Disk management reported it as read only. On reconnect, it would come up as normal but a write operation would cause it to go read only again. After a few attempts, it started coming up as read only on insertion.
This is when I ran through the attempts listed above, to try and reformat it in case of a faulty format. However the inability to do so even on a bootable disk indicated something more serious is wrong. chkdsk now reports nothing is wrong, and fsck still reports MBR inconsistencies, but now always chooses first FAT automatically after telling me FATs differ. It still does the same Free cluster summary wrong afterwards. I cannot run with -p anymore because it is now marked as read only. It also managed to corrupt my VM's disk somehow on the first attempt (yes, I'm sure I chose sda, which is mapped to a 7.4GB drive - I triple checked). Thank god for snapshots?
I'm just about out of ideas. To my inexperienced mind it looks like something in the drive's firmware set it to read only "permanently" somehow - is there any way to reset this? I don't particularly care about keeping data, considering I've reformatted it twice.
As you can see, there are no obvious write protect switches. There is an IC on the other side, ALCOR branded labelled AU6989HL, if that matters. If there appears to be no way to fix this, I'll probably pull out the (glued down) card and put it in a card reader to check if it's the card or the controller that died.
I've pulled the card off, Windows detects the drive as a card reader now. The contacts on the card don't appear to be used, and there are several rows of holes on the card itself. Putting it into the card reader only detects about 30MB total, RAW. It's probably either the original drive incorrectly reporting the card as faulty (as if a real SD card's write protect was switched on) or a bad contact somewhere.
If nothing else, I have a spare 8GB Micro SD card now... as soon as I figure out how to format it as 8GB. Which does not seem to be possible (Windows, Partedmagic, dd, DBAN... nope, still 30MB). Ah well.
I had a few more of these. The second one failed similarly (read only) today. Out of the remaining, two were detected as empty card readers/unformatted drives, depending on shaking (faulty contact?). One was detected as 1/3 full, and had an odd volume name.
While this is a little worrying, evidently the drives actually do have near-8GB capacity, as verified by a tool often successfully used to detect fake flash drives. The use of a Micro SD card rather than a marked flash memory module makes it near impossible to reflash the drive, since Alcor's drive flashing tools expect the memory model as a parameter. I think I'll just throw the whole lot out.
There, you first open LoadDriver.exe and enter your VID and PID (you can find out these values by using ChipGenius, or using Linux and typing "lsusb -v") and click install. For my stick the values were 058F, 6387.
/dev/sdx1 is the partition where as /dev/sdx is the whole drive. You'll need to make sure the partition is unmounted to achieve that. If you cannot dd the drive due to it being read only I would put it down to a hardware fault, which you might see in the dmesg out.
I had this with a USB key I lent to someone to use in their Mac. All files readonly and the disk itself marked as Readonly in Computer Management.I plugged it into a different Mac had a look in Finder and removed it (without ejecting it first I admit).When I plugged it back into my Windows 7 machine it was working fine again.Simple solution, but I realise only any help if you have a Mac nearby
Then format it under this program, exit WBFS Manager, Start, and run Computer Management. Then select Disk Management from the left side of the screen, click on your flash drive and format under windows and the flash drive is working again.
I had the same issue with the "current read-only state: yes". I was trying to figure out why I was not able to delete photos from my SD memory card when I right click the folder. There was no DELETE listed in the drop down window.
The delete option is now listed in the drop down window, when I right click on the picture folder. After reinstalling the driver, I ran a diskpart. The current read-only state is now no. I have a fairly new computer with the Windows 8 operating system.
EBay have agreed to resolve this so this is not about the money it's about fake drives that can fool people thinking that they are buying a reputable brand. I stay away from Chinese no name USB these drives look like the ones in the shop they even have a holograms on the packets making them look high quality.
I have the drives at the moment but don't know if eBay will want me to return them I have photos of the drives and packaging and all the contact details and address for the seller I want to know who to report this to at HP so they can stop this guy from ripping off more people and tarnishing HP's reputation.
BTW there are no serial No. on them that was one of the things that I found strange. even when I checked the drive properties it didnt have a serial no. though clearly they say they are HP drives on the drive and packaging.
I recommend that you do so, because the eBay "Dispute Resolution" process forces the seller to sign-for the returned package, and the tracking-number through the Postal Service proves that the seller received them, and forces eBay to refund you.
I am in the process of returning them to the seller though they have not provided a method of postage or confirmed an address yet. ebey is waiting for a reply from them and will then advise me on what to do.
the drive pacakage states that it is a USB 2/3 OTG drive I asumed that it ment that the usb2 was the device connection and the usb3 was the computer conection but the speed of this drive is well below that of even a usb2 drive.
A couple of years ago I picked up a conference give-away flash drive (4GB), which at the time seemed like a pretty nice freebie. The trouble was it only every liked to play nice with my Windows machine, Linux would refuse to mount it. The headline photo is the final product, I failed to take a before picture but the leather + snap case on this USB thumb drive was hideous anyway.
The very first thing I did was use the linux command lsusb, this helped me clue in that there was something wrong (fake) with the drive. I found a forum post that helped me get started down the right path. I got a copy of ChipGenius which told me the following:
So this felt like progress: it's 2GB and not 4GB as Windows seems to think. Still not bad for free. I then used my camera to get some close up shots of the naked circuit board to confirm the data that the ChipGenius tool dug out.
During all of this I was in contact with caiching28, and he finally agreed that as the pen was only 25% of the stated capacity he should give me a 75% refund. He has. Originally I was asking for a full refund, but as I had then reprogrammed the pen it seemed unfair.
The LED on the flash drive is always on, not sure if this is significant. However, based on the fact that the memory chip did not show a visible serial number I suspect this is a factory reject and will throw it in the garbage. If I kept the drive I would only store files, that I did not have other copies of, and use the 7Zip program to save files on the flash drives as it will detect data errors when reading data from the drive.
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