Fake Flash drive repair and use!

Here's something a bit different. I recently bought a Flash Drive online to store some music and have it playing in my car. The seller claimed it was a 128GB, USB 2.0 drive so I was surprised to see it was cheap (around 10$) and decided to give it a try. Once it arrived I noticed there was no logo on it, just a metallic clip.

I plugged it on my laptop, opened the properties menu and voila, 128GB of space available! Or so I thought. I transferred most of my music and large files to the drive. Then, I tried to open a large file and nothing happened. The file was corrupted and blah blah blah... So, I looked it up and most people that bought such allegedly "high capacity" flash drives at such low prices found out they were simply fake 4gb or 8gb drives. You can read all about it here: http://www.ebay.com/gds/All-About-Fake-Flash-Drives-2013-/10000000177553258/g.html

There is actually a program that can test if your flash drive is a fake, It's called "FakeFlashTest" and you can find it here: http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/-fake-usb-flash-memory-drives

Nevertheless, you don't have to spend much time testing your usb drive. If your drive is not made by a well-known manufacturer and it claims to be a 64gb-1TB drive despite costing a few bucks, it's a fake... Don't toss it out just yet though!
 The only problem is you cannot really use a fake drive unless you format it to its original specs. Once it's formatted according to the appropriate capacity specs, you can use it just like every other  use drive, there's nothing else wrong with it. The best way to do so, is to find out the model of its built in controller chip. In many cases, you can open up the chassis of the use drive and spot the little controller chip on one side of the PCB. Once you spot it, you can read its model code with a magnifying glass. You can also simply take a good photo of the chip using your smartphone. Then, enlarge the photo to read the chip code easily, That's exactly what I did:

The Chip model was actually the Chipsbank CBM2098E.

Here's it is:


To format this particular chip, you need nothing more than the appropriate software. After some googling around, I visited the following site and downloaded the freeware formating tool:
CBM2098 APToolV6008(2014-08-15)
http://www.usbdev.ru

The zip file of this tool contains two executable files, a 32-bit version(APToolV6A32)  and a 64-bit version (APToolV6A). Open the appropriate program according to your operating system. You can find out how many bits your windows system has by clicking the Start Menu -> Right click on "This PC"-> click "Properties" and then looking at the "System" tab:

And here's the formatting program itself:

Make sure you've plugged the USB drive on a single usb port, not an external hub, with no other USB devices plugged to the same port/ internal hub. Unplug all your external usb hard drives/usb disks as well!
The program will automatically recognize the USB fake disk and you can then hit the button: "All Start". You don't have to mess with any other settings. Once the disk is formatted, you can click the "Eject" button. Close the program, plug in your device and voila! You can now use your USB drive just like any other drive. Check its new capacity as well. It should be around 4-16GB if you're lucky.

To avoid future bumps, here's the real deal! Genuine USB drives.
www.thomann.de/gb/usb_storage.html?partner_id=73786


Cheers,
Thanos!