Hello,

Does anyone have experience with jump drives and can point me in to the right direction. The jump drive is a Lexar with 256 MB.
The Jump drive has not been recognized at all. I now got the jump drive to show up, but it displays the wrong capacity. In windows it shows up as unformatted 56 MB drive. Looking at the physical size with winhex also just shows 56 MB. Media tools does not recognize the usb jump drive at all. and I can't recover any data of the 56 MB which are readable from the drive. Also the hex values on the drive really look abnormal.
And before I forget it, windows can not format the jump drive.

Do I have to swap firmware chip?
which chip is the Firmware chip?

Thank you

What is a jump drive i have heard of a usb flash drive but what is the jump drive .

Hello Rameez,

It's the same thing as a usb flash drive.

Happy new years to you

Hi quasimodo!
It seems your jump drive is funtioning as a " protected drive ".
That means is password protectedby a specific utility from manufacturer.
With this type of utility you can create hiden partitions, password proction on it and so on.
Bad news is that you can have back full access to the entire usb jump drive with the only utility from the manufacturer.
As far i can seen, there is no other way to re-gain access to your data!

That's the reason for the strange behaviour of that piece of hardware

Happy new year to all of us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks now i now the alternate for usb drive .

update:

I opened the drive and there was a little switch on the inside, which was not accessible from the outside. I moved the switch and know the drive shows up as a 128MB drive. Which is an increase to the previous 56MB, but it still doesn't give me access to the full 256 MB.
And still no data at all. I also belive that it is a hardware problem. I am not familiar with the PCB on flash/jump drives.

Any ideas as of which ic's to start swapping ?

Thanks for your help guys.

Hi,

First check wether there is a correct 3.3V supply when U connect the drive to the USB.
there should be some voltage regulator to create this supply, it is probably a 'transistor-like' element with 3 or 5 pins.
one pin 5V from the USB power line,
one pin GND,
one pin 3.3V
If this is OK, U should check the clock at the crystal pins, and check if there are any traffic at the flash memory's IO pins (consult the actual memory product's datasheet, but usually the different products have similar pinouts).
U may swap the controller chip if U think that's the faulty one.
These things store some 'FW' in the memory itself and this area may be damaged as well rendering the drive inoperable. In this case there is no other way of recovering the data than desoldering the memory IC(s) from the drive and reading them out in a programmer, then trying to put together the Filesystem from the fragments (not an easy work)

regards,
pepe

Thank you pepe,

This was the information I was looking for. The voltage seams to be good. So it's probably the memory IC. Since there is a backup of this data which is only a few days old. It is probably not worth the hassle trying to read out the IC.

I will do some further research on this.

Thank you for your help.