Possibly (or probably?) a counterfeit micro 32G card?

* The card worked to port (via USB reader & card adapter) about 4Gs of photos onto it from W XP and view on Android tablet (4Gs? of photos). Files on card are expendable.

* Then next day upon boot, the tablet reports 'need to format card before using' message. (Repeated on W7 and XP). Unable to read any files on card.

* W7 & XP unable to read or format card in USB reader, Windows format tool can't determine size of memory using an adapter SD disk in a USB reader. This setup works fine with a 2G and an 8G microSD card and a full sized 16G SDHC card.

* Unable to confirm full function of USB reader with 32G microCard in SD adapter other than it originally was used to transfer files to the same card. Presumably, there's no reader limitation on card memory size, but can't be proved with what I've got available.

* Here's what comes up running the tool noted below with the 32g micro card in an adapter in a USB reader on W7 64U.

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Current date and time: 5/3/2011 9:26:24 AM
Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool 2.36 build 1181; http://hddguru.com
Device details for SAMSUNG HD103UJ 1AA01113 [1000.2 Gbytes]

Details are unavailable: Internal error.
Please post this problem on http://forum.hddguru.com

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Obviously, there is no such thing as a 1000.2G microSD card. Just to see what happened, I tried a low level format with the software above, it reports a series of "<date> Format error occurred at offset <number>" <Number> goes up and up presumably towards 1000Gs. I stopped it at 65Gs...

Is there a low level tool to rewrite the Gs on the card? Somehow, something changed this number on the card... And the available tools seem to key off of it... To get nothing done...

Here is my interpretation of the data you've supplied; I'm not saying that mine is the only possible interpretation:

a) Look carefully at the output from the Low Level Format Tool. Before it "keeled over", it was reporting the 1TB size (1000.2GB) of a Samsung HD103UJ disk drive. Therefore do not waste time thinking that this is anything to do with the microSD card. I expect that the microSD card is not being reported at all by that tool, in its current state.

b) Given that you can't confirm that the card reader definitely works correctly with a known-good 32GB card, then a card reader limitation can't be ruled out. Unexpected card size limitations have been seen with some reader chipsets/firmware versions. However, as you said, given that the card reader seemed to function correctly at the beginning, the card reader isn't my first concern.

c) You seem to be saying that after copying 4GB of data to the card, it was then not usable after the next attempt to read the whole FAT (e.g. on the next reboot). This sort of behaviour is indeed typical of that from fake/counterfeit flash memory cards & USB drives, where less Flash memory (in your case, perhaps 4GB?) is physically present, but the memory controller was programmed to report (and try to use) a larger amount of Flash memory (in your case, 32GB).

Given the current state of the card, I'm not sure whether you can successfullly use h2testw to perform its (data destructive) write/read tests on the card, to find out how much unique Flash actually exists on the card - but you can try (since you say that the data is expendable):

http://fightflashfraud.wordpress.com/20 ... ity-flash/

I suspect that the card might now be totally unusable (which most likely means it was a counterfeit to begin with), although a small possibility exists that it was a genuine 32GB card which was faulty.


Some such tools do exist for USB memory controllers; I haven't seen one for microSD controllers - but that doesn't mean that none exist since, by definition, I can't tell you about things I've never seen. However, you seemed to be asking that question from the false premise that the 1000.2GB value was being reported by the microSD card - and it wasn't.

Hope those comments help.

Thanks.

The W7-64-U computer that supposedly read the card at 1000.2Gs did have a 1000 G HDD, possibly Samsung... However the software indicated it was reading the card... So, there's something screwy going on there.

Especially, since I attempted to format this card with the software, and now that computer won't boot -- booting up reports there's no OS on the HD. Which is what you'd expect if the HDD was reformated, not the card! You'd think a card formatting utility would have some significant built in restrictions from reformatting HDDs -- apparently not..

It seems the card formatting software was redirected by a software glitch of some sort to think the HDD was really the card! So, when I thought I was reformating the card, I was reformatting the main HDD! Which I now have to try to restore, since it won't boot from the HDD...

In the meantime, before you noted the 1t HDD Samsung issue, I moved the card reader to a laptop and tried Panasonic's card formatting software. It at least reported 32Gs on the card... But it was clearly having troubles reading the card -- it took minutes... It also wasn't able to reformat the card. However, it didn't attempt to format my laptop's HDD.

So, I've contacted the Amazon source of the card and asked for a refund. It could be a faulty or counterfeit card... If not provided, then I'll let Amazon will deal with it -- they seem to be pretty good at this stuff in past experience... Hopefully, W7U can be reinstalled on the reformated 1T drive.

And the card software related to this forum has serious 'issues'. Thankfully, I'm unaware of any critical unbackuped stuff on the erased/reformatted/possibly damaged HDD caused by the apparent card formatting software malfunction... Who needs this stuff anyways...

I'm glad you've got a plan for getting a refund on the card.


I don't know who actually supports that tool on this forum, but based on the error message which you first included, it clearly encountered a problem.

I can't find it with a search (probably due to so many slightly different names for the tool), but I seem to remember a posting a while ago about another Win7 user having a problem trying to use it - notice that the last version I can see (ver.2.36 build 1181 from 2006), predates Win 7 and hence can't have been tested for compatibility.

http://hddguru.com/software/2006.04.12- ... rmat-Tool/

As you see, it doesn't mention Win 7 as being compatible.


Who said that something called "HDD Low Level Format Tool" shouldn't reformat HDDs?

I'm genuinely sorry to hear that something has gone wrong when you've been using it, such that it seems to have overwritten your 1TB disk, but any expectation for "restrictions from reformatting HDDs" is unrealistic IMHO - don't you think?


So the internal Flash memory controller in the card is still functioning (at least to some extent).


That's typical behavour for a counterfeit card, which has attempted to write to more Flash than actually exists.


Unfortunately Amazon Marketplace (if that's what you're referring to) seems to be almost as bad as Ebay for counterfeit Flash memory. For a project, a friend wanted to deliberately buy some counterfeit USB Flash drives, and was able to easily source some counterfeits from Amazon Marketplace. I hope that Amazon supports you better than Ebay do!

Good luck

Thanks for the reply. One thing to be clear of is the software was referring to the SD drive not the c drive when it commenced attempting to reformat the c drive. Fortunately, w7 managed to repair the boot format issues without a full reinstall.

And thanks for your updates.


Understood. - but I have no idea whether the author (whoever that is) will fix this utility for Win 7, given that it never claimed to be Win 7-compatible. I'll try sending a PM to the moderator, to make them aware, but I can't think of anything else I can do.


That's good to hear.

However if it was me, I would be concerned about more than just a boot issue (i.e. other possibly overwritten sectors which you haven't yet detected). I would look at the "Format error occurred at offset <number>" messages which you got (if you kept a copy), to see if I could see any range of sectors where an error was not reported, which would suggest that some sectors were successfully erased. Just my $0.02.