Flash drives are mini computers with their own operating system called firmware. If the firmware is corrupt or unable to load because of an issue with the flash memory chip, the flash drive will boot into safe mode. If your…
Thank you emails are always awesome... :-) Jeremy, I received the new flash drive on Friday. I cannot tell you how happy and relieved I was to be able to open my files again. When my flash drive snapped in…
I want to do a series of videos demonstrating the general ideas behind off-chip recovery and the tools involved. Here is an example of an off-chip recovery from an SM321 QF USB Flash Drive Controller using Flash Extractor. This is…
Check out this video of a promotional flash drive with hacked firmware. The NAND chip is actually 8GB but the controller is configured to recognize it as 4GB. My guess is that this allows the manufacture to sell different capacity…
Promotional flash drives are manufactured in Shenzhen China and branded with a company logo, then given away as a promotional item, usually for free at conventions or to employees. These flash drives are often programmed to report the wrong capacity…
We got an old USBest UT163 flash drive in. When we started doing data recovery in 2007 these were pretty common, now not so much. They are amazingly simple flash drives compared to modern flash drives. The write procedure for…
(You don't have to use this testimonial but I want to say it anyway) I cannot thank you enough for your superior customer service and quality work. Prior to finding you on a Google search, I called 2 other places…
We got a Lexar Professional 800x in for data recovery. The Professional series are all based on Silicon Motion CF controllers with Intel/Micron NAND flash memory. Depending on the generation Lexar has implemented some interesting modifications, for example, doubling the…
We had the pleasure of recovering a monolithic FAR8GBHSTT24ADAK 8GB flash drive. It uses a hacked Alcor Micro AU6989 controller with a software bad columns implementation and 8GB Toshiba NAND flash memory chip. This monolithic chip has two data buses but…
If a flash drive isn't seen when plugged into a computer is can be for a variety of reasons. In this case the drive was dead, we took the NAND chip out of circuit and the controller booted into manufacturing…