Hi, guys!
Did anyone encountered that kind of chip?
It was definitely a firmware problem so took it off.

As there is no controller, and FORESEE are predominately a major vendor of eMMC and embedded nand+controllers, plus the fact there is no controller on the PCB, I would say you would need to find a datasheet. Likely a NAND + controller of some sort. This particular chip, I believe was made by Longsys, which does designing of controllers for Foresee.

These companies also do a lot of contract, non-publicised work, Think military, and chips such as this can be refurbished from odd jobs and repackaged mainstream, meaning even the company will deny knowledge of it.

I would be looking for BGA33, VFBGA33, FBGA depending on what they think is fine or very fine.. or BGA25 if they do not count the stability pads.

Or measure the package with vernier callipers and look for that size during a search

I would be very interested to see the case this was in.

I don't think there is going to be raw nand access, maybe fire up a logic analyser and look for SD or emmc signals

Thanks for the tips.
The package is as follows.
As you may see it has also a lightning connector.
The USB itself wasn't recognized by the computer.
In HEX it showed 5.5 kb partition gap filled with zeros and that was it.
So I thought it was a FW issue and removed the chip.

Hi,
In that case I would try:


- Resolder chip on.
- plug into windows machine with DMDE installed, and have DMDE shortcut somewhere you don't need to browse for it. Idea is to not do any un-necessary file, folder access. example a shortcut on taskbar.
- DO NOT open any file manager windows, close any that pop up.
-with drive in USB slot, open DMDE and take an image of whole device (ignore any partitions)

if you get I/O error:
- firmware could be corrupt
- NAND could be damaged
- wire bond internally could be broken
- electronics component could be faulty or out of spec.

if you get a good image but no files, such as all 0x00 or 0xFF
-device could be formatted / wiped
- firmware issues / bug

in flash there are many possibilities. You can NEVER say "obviously it is.." unless you see physical damage and rectify it. Just too many variables.


best case is filesystem is damaged but raw recovery will work

Interesting device, I wonder if there was a PC based way to access from the lightning side..

In WinHex there was only one partition - 5.5 kb. So I cannon take the dump of whole device.
Tried connecting it to an iPhone - nothing happened
I agree the possibilities of damage are vast and unexpected
Will try finding a datasheet.
Thank you

Wow,
Very interesting .Might be if you get some kind of data sheet you can actually find out what it is

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon
CDRLabs Data Recovery - [ Chandigarh ,India ]
My Data Recovery Experiments - > https://www.facebook.com/chandigarhdatarecovery

I would at least identify the chip's supply and ground pins. Also determine the supply voltages by powering up the stick and measuring the voltages across the capacitors.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Frank ,
To me it feels like a near monolith semiconductor with some components at the other side ,definitely to do with power handling and distribution .Very interesting indeed ,never seen such a chip

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon
CDRLabs Data Recovery - [ Chandigarh ,India ]
My Data Recovery Experiments - > https://www.facebook.com/chandigarhdatarecovery

All I'm saying is that when you have an unknown chip, the easiest thing to do is to identify its supply voltage requirements. In fact you must do this. Only then can you experiment with the signal pins with reasonable safety.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

"there was only one partition - 5.5 kb. So I cannon take the dump of whole device."

Not a true statement, logically speaking.

partitions have no bearing over taking a dump of the whole device. Or look at it another way - if you could not read bytes past the 5.5kb, your pc would have no way repartitioning it.



if you had a drive full of pictures, then repartitioned it to a 20MB partition, leaving the rest free space, chances are that if you imaged the whole disk, did recovery on that image in "raw recovery mode" you would get most of your pictures back