flash drive not shwoing under windows

[crecomp]

Hi all
i have a question and am hoping someone can shed some light on it please as i am in the process of getting a pc3000 flash

the drivei have is an 8gb drive that will show under windows as a drive but none of my recovery program can access it, rstudio will not even give me the option to scan.

I am suspecting possibly a damaged controller on the pcb.

My question is
i have an identical drive, can i assume that i can move the memory chip from the faulty board to the working board to recover the data?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[pcimage]

Hi,

Very much sounds like a controller fault.

First of all, try slightly bending the device about gently and squeezing tight the flash chip and the controller chip to the PCB, then try reflowing the solder with a hot air gun.

If you have noy joy with that (or don't have PC3000 flash, soft-center tools or similar) then you could try moving that NAND chip to an IDENTICAL device.

It must be absolutely identical in every way though, as the controllers vary widely even from apparently similar controllers. For example "USBest UT163-L4" is different to a "USBest UT163-L6".

This doesn't work at all on a lot of Sandisk controllers though, as they are encrypted and the encryption key is inside the controller chip (nasty!)

Good luck

[crecomp]

Thankyou for the reply. I will check on all those things especially controller and see how it goes.
I have one question re the encryption on a drive. How does the pc3000 flash or other tools mentioned address this if the memory chip is removed and read in the utility?
Thankyou

[dobrevjetser]

They do NOT.
Encrypted means lost

Dobre

[laptokowiec]

What the system says ? - "there's no isk in the drive" or "disk is empty" ?

[crecomp]

Hi disc mounts under windows and shows drive letter but all scans are completely empty

[laptokowiec]

Did you try to quick format it ?
Does the system allow to format your disk ?