[LIFE/WORK] How to discover and fix fake usb flash drive size...

Today I want to talk about one phenomenon that it's increasing during these years: the usb flash drives and the counterfeit mechanism.

 

The obsolete floppy drives are very rare in the new computers because they:

Fig. 1 Floppy vs. Usb flash drive

• have ridiculous space ( at least 1000 times less space)
• are incredible slow (200 times less)
• are physically bigger (10-50 times)
• have less reliability
• cost/space more than 350 times

For these reason the usb flash drives are the facto standard.

As the demand is very high it is possible to buy a huge variety of usb flash drive and:

1. Cost
   • From 4€ ( Verbatim Store 'n' Go Pin Stripe 4GB, LEXAR USB JUMPDRIVE S50 4GB) to   ~800-1000€ ( Kingston DataTraveler 310 256GB, Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator 256GB, DataTraveler HyperX Predator 1TB)
2. Size
   • From 4GB to 1TB
3. Speed

   

   Fig. 2: Tiny Usb flash drive

   • up to ~200MB/s (SanDisk Extreme)
4. Physical dimension down to ~1x1cm

The war of lowering the prices is always increasing and very often we've to be careful with the extreme deals: the china market have introduced a cool counterfeiting technique called ShengJi (upgrading size). It's very simple: a mod in the memory controller make more space visible to the operating system.
Some SW like MPTool can easily do this counterfeiting technique so it's clear that it's very simple and every not honest reseller can do this  very simply. I suggest to buy usb flash drive in the certified reseller and be careful with eBay, Amazon and the others.

So the goal of my post i to show to you how to check if your usb flash drive is counterfeit.
The typical symptom is that when you try to write a file you can receive a write error, but this happens only if the operating system request a writing action in the extra area: this can be seen very easily when we have the usb flash drive almost full.
Another symptom is that the usb flash drive becomes write protected: when we try to format the drive the operating system goes in error like if the usb drive has the hardware switch protection active.

Before trashing your usb flash drive, wait because you can recover it!

The most rapid test is to download a great tool called ChipGenius: we can download it here. Once we've started it we've to plug the usb flash drive and wait for the recognition.
The following image is an example of my fake 32GB usb flash drive:

Fig. 3: ChipGenius detailed information window

This tool is so simple but very powerful because it can read the controller configuration and the FLASH information. As you can see here the Flash ID code is manufactured by Toshiba an has total capacity of 8GB.

Well if we have this difference between the operating system size (in my case 32GB) and true FLASH size we are pretty sure that we have a counterfeit usb flash drive!

 

In order to clear every doubts it's necessary to investigate the problem with three software programs:

1. FakeFlashTest 
2. RMPrepUSB
3. H2TESTW

I've ordered them by the execution time, so let's start with FakeFlashTest.

FakeFlashTest

The interface is very simple.

Fig. 4: FakeFlashTest program

As reported in the image we have to do two steps:

1. Select the usb drive letter that we want to test.
2. Run Quick Size Test

If the test fails  we can read the log in order to discover the range of fake size.
At the end of the log there's the Recommended Maximum usable partition size which reports the real size of the usb flash drive.

RMPrepUSB

The interface is more rich than FakeFlashTest because this tool is designed to create bootable drive with plenty of options.

Fig. 5: RMPrepUSB program

As FakeFlashTest we need to execute the same test Quick Size Test: it's the same as shown above. The only difference is that RMPrepUsb use windows command shell as log output.

H2TESTW

If one or both of the above SW does not return error (pretty rare) we can try to execute this cool SW:

Fig. 6: H2TESTW

As reported in the image we have to do three steps:

1. I suggest to change language to English
2. Select the usb drive letter that we want to test.
3. Run Write + Verify

As this tool is a bit obsolete the execution time can be very long depending on the writing and reading speed of your usb flash drive. I suggest to run during the night while you're sleeping!
If the usb flash drive is fake the output error can be something like this:

 

          The media is likely to be defective.        
         29.6 GByte OK (62266396 sectors)          
          20.4 MByte DATA LOST (41956 sectors)
          Details:20.4 MByte overwritten (41956 sectors)
          0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
          0 KByte corrupted (0 sectors)          
          20.4 MByte aliased memory (41956 sectors)
          First error at offset: 0x0000000153404000
          Expected: 0x0000000153404000
          Found: 0x000000039340c000         
          H2testw version 1.3
          Writing speed: 4.74 MByte/s
          Reading speed: 16.7 MByte/s 
          H2testw v1.4

Like the previous tools H2TESTW indicate ho many sectors are defective.

So after we have known that our usb flash drive is really fake we can do two solution:

1. to reformat with the suggested useful size using RMPrepUSB
2. to restore it to the real factory default value size using factory software

I strongly suggest the second option because the factory software will do FLASH test (checksum, CRC etc.) and more.

Find factory FLASH tool

This is the last step we've to do and I we're lucky it takes very few time to complete. First of all I suggest the fastest way so reload ChipGenius and look at the end of the log analysis:

 

Fig. 7: ChipGenius detailed information window

In my example I'm lucky because ChipGenius reports all data of the FLASH memory: a Toshiba chip. In this case we can read at the end the link of the related tools: here we can find the FLASH tool. Be patient because very often these web page are written in Chinese language but you can use Google translate to find where to click in order to download the right tool.

If you are not lucky ChipGenius reports only few data (no FLASH brand neither Tools link page) but certainly reports the the usb device IDs: VID and PID.

The next step is to go to this very very useful database: FlashBoot.ru iFlash database. It is in Russian language but it's very simple because we have only to insert VID and the PID as reported in the following image:

 

Fig. 8: IFlash database query

As you can see in Fig. 7, my fake usb flash drive VID is 0011 and PID is 7788. As the results are high (802) I suggest to try to find everything related to ChipGenius results. After my search I found this:

Fig. 9: IFlash database query detail

Clicking on it i reached the same tool I found with ChipGenius: Alcor MP:

 

Fig. 10: Alcor MP flash tool

In the Setup button we can configure a lot of advanced settings (FLASH chip type, checks, definition of VID and PIT and a lot of more) but i suggest to leave the default setting.

Now we have to click Start and wait until the end: this process is slow so expect to wait also hours.

If everything goes fine you will have your new refurbished usb flash drive.

I've reported only my case so expect that you have to work with a different tool like Alcor MP.


I want to summarize the following things:

• Pay attention when you buy an usb flash drive
• Check it immediately
• Trash it only if you can not execute the check tools that I've shown above

See Ya!