The yellow mat is the villain of the channel and after a while if he replaces the yellow mat, people are going to ask what happened to the yellow mat 😂
I suspect the 50gb found on a 32gb card is due to crosslinked files, some that were previously deleted, but partially overwritten, so that the recovery software believes it has found something valid (and it may indeed be partially recoverable) but it will likely be corrupted due to parts of the file 'belonging' to a different file.
Yeah and I've bought tons of stuff on Amazon - but I still can't find a MMV branded Blue Mat or Vince's IPA 99.9% - why aren't those in the merch store?? 🤤
My dear Vince, sorry to hear of your mishap and hope you will be in the mend quickly. Great video as always. One note, most flash memory type devices actually have far far more raw storage than they sell for. If fact many have upwards of 500g raw capacity. During manufacturing they are tested for how much is in fact working and as such they are graded and this often determines the amount of storage they can safely be sold for. This is also why some unscrupulous manufacturers sell larger storage devices cheaper, because they sometimes sell closer to the amount tested as good. Out of the Safe amount they then divide that by some factor (usually 8 to 16) and that fraction will be what its sold as. The software in the controller in turn maps the good regions. After a certain number of writes failures start to appear. When this happens the data is remapped to one of the spare areas. This is what provides extended life for some of the more reputable brands. When the available good space becomes exhausted they become read only. Unfortunately often the most updated areas of the disk are the file descriptor blocks which contain the directory entries. As space becomes low, if it us unable to update these the root directory becomes corrupt making the device unreadable by the OS but yet still recoverable. Other times the are of the storage that holds the block map itself becomes corrupt rendering the entire device completely useless. It's a simplified explanation but gives you an idea of what is going on internally.
Great video! Wish you a speedy recovery! Note; in case you're unaware, normally in Windows command prompt, instead of typing back a previously entered command, you can just press the up arrow to get the command back saving you the time/effort
Horrible that you suffered that injury, Vince. All the best for the recovery. You’re absolutely right that your nail is missing, but it doesn’t mean it won’t grow back. If the nail bed is intact a new nail will grow. I’ve had it happen with a toe nail that came off. It’ll take a few months to fully grow back if it does. I hope the same happens during your recovery.
Think the 50GB showing on one of the drives is just because the recovery software uses a couple of different methods to look for files, and it has added together the results from both of those searches. So there will be duplicates between the two methods, where the same file has been found both ways. It probably can't tell for sure that the files are duplicates either as they might not be 100% complete or the metadata may be missing from them. The methods are probably looking at what's left of the file allocation table (basically the index of files on the disk) and the other way would be to read through all the data sectors bit-by-bit and see what you come across
Oh that makes a lot of sense as the 4 movies on the other USB drive were listed twice but under slightly different headings. Thanks for clearing that up ekens 👍👍
Hope your finger gets better soon Vince! Sucks to have such an injury especially given you use your hands more often than most. Got my fingers crossed for you (put intended lol)
In these failures that prevent formatting, there is an order to follow until one of them repairs it: 1.- Recover the data with programs like the one you have shown in the video. 2.- Use a disk editor like WinHex and delete the initial zones, partition and boot. Then try partitioning and formatting with Windows Disk Manager. 3.- Use low-level formatting programs that format the controller and the memory. Windows formatting only formats the memory. They are provided by the manufacturer of the flash drive. On the internet there are some like ALCOR that I used to correctly repair one.
Hey Vince I hope your finger heals up soon without any issues. although this was a non-fix I always enjoy your videos as every video is a learning experience.
I used to do a little data recovery work, when a thumb drive is read only that usually means that it has gone into protection mode for not having enough good cells to safely write data to, this is just to let you copy out data before it fails completely. You can change that with the manufacturing tool for the controller it is using.
@@zZFlaviusBoss I have seen that some SSD recovery software do list that it can access hidden storage, so that might be the safe and legal way to do it, to get access to the programming software you technically have to get an ODM license from the supplier of the controller chip... buuuut, Google is a thing.
Wow. I wish you a speedy recovery, Vince. I broke my knuckle once and I was due to fly out the next day. A&E had put my hand and forearm into a cast. That very night I cut the cast off because the airline would not have let me fly. As soon as I landed I had it re-cast and it stayed on for the next 3 weeks then a splint for another 4 weeks.
Great effort Vince 👍👍. It's not a failure if you learn something in the process! Sorry to hear about your finger! Hope it gets better soon! Best wishes.
sorry to hear about your finger thats horible! Hope it heals soon and good luck with your projects moving forward. Irony of fixing thumb drives just about the size of a finger while recovering from the damage. Thanks again for the great and wonderful educational content you make.
Remember a few months ago you said you want to travel to different techies' and do collabs? I'm moving soon, would be pretty cool if we could arrange something like that in the near future
Sorry to hear about your finger, Vince. I had to see a plastic surgeon a few years back. I fell whilst holding a cup and ending up severing the nerve to my index finger and also nicking the ligament. Thankfuly the ligament wasn't totally severed and they managed to reattach the nerve. The side of my finger was numb for quite some time, but as the nerve regenerated the feeling came back to about 90%. Being a musician, the worst part was not being able to play for a while. Bit of a data breach with all that Uni info on it.
Sad to hear about your accident! When it comes to SSD, you can put important data on them, but make sure to have backup! But backup is important even if you store your data on a hard-disk-drive! About the memory stick that is marked read only, the last thing you can try is to ( delete the volume ) and create a new one! /Lifooz
A great point, there is no substitute for an offsite backup. Sure, a HDD may outlast an SSD, but they are both worthless if your house happens to go up in flames
I was in a reliability engineering position at a disc drive company for 34 years, and I was a bit appalled that once we got into SSD type drives, the SSDs would 'wear out' after heavy continuous writing. I've been gone from there for a number of years, but it looks like solid state storage hasn't improved as much as I would have expected.
They did get more reliable, but they started using more states for each cell rather than binary, so that lessened the time to failure back again, and the industry has continued with this, better flash that is then offset with more states, most cheap SSDs have 8 or more distinct levels per cell now. There are "pro" models that have SLC that have the reliability, but you have to pay way more for it.
I had a similar issue in the 2010s at a warehouse I worked at. I had determined the controller was firmware locked from malware that was going around the warehouse from people bringing in their drives when they weren't supposed to. I had to go to a sketchy Chinese site and get the firmware tool for the controller and do a firmware flash to it to get it working again. Note that the drive was only a few months old, so wasn't at its EOL fine frame.
Good attempt at fixing those thumbdrives. I hope your finger heals quickly, looks like you did quite a number. Being a natural born clutz through and through I've had my fair share of finger injuries among others. Luckily my husband is a nurse so I keep him on his toes.
I had a similar incident with a door , it hurt a lot son i understand what you are going through although mine only ended up with black nails , get well soon . Those driving license files etc might be to do with a scam setup
Hi Vince ... I think I put it in the letter or messages. I bought four of them from ebay with the intention of playing around with them. one was blank, but I formatted it anyway. the rest just got thrown in a drawer ..... You had me panicking when the photos came up! ....... I will send you a link to the original ebay listing, if nothing, just to cover myself ... lol
Good grief, I did the same thing as a teenager to a baby toe. It was hanging from a shred of skin. I lost feeling in it but it looks just fine - they had a plastic surgeon reattach it as well. That was the night I learned that plastic surgeons handle all kinds of skin trauma issues, from reattaching digits to removing scars after the dermatologist has removed skin cancers.
You are correct about not storing important data on SSD, but any drive can fail including traditional mechanical HDD. The important thing is to store multiple copies of your important data. The rule is 3-2-1 meaning 3 copies, on at least 2 different types of media (e.g. SSD and HDD), and 1 of the copies must be offsite. Use a backup program that runs automatically so you don't forget.
Which is why I use optical. I don't have to worry about an optical discs firmware mucking up the media lol. Thus I store all archival data to Bd-r, backed up to tape (simply because I can) and uploaded to the cloud as a last resort (which will cost the earth to recover thus it is literally the very last resort). Non archive data is kept on HDD's backed up to a NAS, which is next to the front door so if I have to escape the house I can grab the Nas too!
Love the yellow mat! Hope you are healing well. I once tried to use an awl to clean gunk from a small space and it somehow slipped, flew upwards and split my thumb open an inch lengthways on the side, proper deep cut, so you have my sympathies!
Talking about near severed fingers I almost lost the tip of my left index finger while splitting woods for kindling with a hatchet. The break in the bone was at a angle which means that the surgeon had to grind down the two bones to make them level and a titanium rod to stabilize the bones. Now it looks like it alot better now while it shorter so I can count 9.75 fingers
I've also read that not only are there write limits of flash, but SSD's will also slowly "rot" if they're unused. Not physically rot, but the data will slowly be corrupted. The flash memory cells eventually leak so a written-to-only-once SSD is still not suitable for archive purposes. The extra storage is also part of the approach to extend life of the devices. Flash storage controllers have "wear levelling" logic in them so that some cells may be worn out from extended use and they end up being mapped to fresh cells, transparently.
One thing that might help with the SSD; I don't know if this is implemented by Kingston, but most Sata SSDs have a "recovery mode" that starts when you only plug in power and not the data connector. Usually it would take 3-5 attempts of only plugging in power and leaving it for a minute or two. Not sure if that is possible with your sata to usb adapter though.
I love this video, Vince! But I highly recommend having a trash computer to do USB drive testing from unknown or partially known sources. Never plug it into anything connected to the internet or anything with any real data on it.
I understand your pain and frustration with not being able to work at your usual 100% as am sitting here at home watching your video and nursing a fracture and a dislocated shoulder ☹
Once a USB drive goes read-only, you can't re-enable it using Windows because it's a decision made by the drive's controller and not Windows itself. Depending on the drive controller, however, you might be able to give it a second life by using the respective controller's MPTool (Mass Production tool) which the manufacturer would have used to setup the drive in the factory. There are the USBDEV forums (in Russian) which have a lot of info about this sort of stuff.
Is there any place in English to find those mpt tools? There's so much fake flash memory out there and as far as I know this is the only way to repair them. Also as I understand it you can use such software to choose to set these devices to a lower capacity by increasing spare and redundant cells to increase reliability. Ideally that's what I would like to do!
@@petevenuti7355 Most mass production tools are switchable between Chinese/English. If you're talking about UsbDev, Google Translate is probably your best bet. I personally use the auto google translate feature of Chromium-based browsers while browsing the site.
If you're using linux, you don't need any special manufacturer programs. Windows severely limits what you can do with your hardware. That's a gpd pocket he has... It's pretty crap piece of hardware, but it does have support for Linux.
@@runed0s86 if you can write a hardware driver with direct access does it really matter what OS? I'm asking what's software exists that can edit those firmware parameters that are in English that I might get my hands on.. I don't care what OS... I just want to be the script Kiddie here, where most of the hard work is already done... To get all the information I would need do it myself it, things would change too much and not be relevant by the time I completed the project ... Speaking of, I like OS\2 , I got a lot of catching up to do..
Sorry about your hand! A lot of people wouldn't bother being courteous and try to prevent a door from slamming, so kudos, even if it bit you in the end!
Big yikes about the finger. And here I thought I had it rough when I levered off a toe nail last week, but that's on another level. Hope you'll recover quickly!
I'm sorry about your finger, Vince. I hope that nail-bed is not too badly damaged. I sliced the end off my finger in a gate when I was 7 and the nail has grown back annoyingly unevenly ever since. It bugs me to this day. I suspect the plastic surgeons are better today than they were nearly 50 years ago
12:05 if an entry isn't there you add it manually. I'd say a lot of the time people go into regedit the entry they're there to change isn't even there by default, I remember it being that way for me
Vince, I’d be skeptical about plugging any usb devices into my main computer. If I’d somehow bridged something while soldering I’d worry of something damaging the controller on my motherboard and killing usb functionality. Maybe an adapter,pci express card or less important pc. In regards to incorrect space showing for recovered files, these are likely just the totals of the file headers that the software found. All this data will not be recoverable and will be partially or fully damaged. I know I’ve seen specialists hook up the flash memory chips to independent socket readers and recover data that way, but you’d have to Google it.
After watching hours of data recovery videos, I know that you should always buy two flash drives. One is unused, act like doner for controller. You need the same controller model, version, series, firmware installed. Only controller got algorithm how to scramble data across NAND memory. If controller is dead and doner board isn't available - you need to connect directly into NAND memory chip using low level NAND protocol and lab tool called PC-3000. Then this tool got database of controller algorithm and firmware, so can mock controller behavior to merge data across whole NAND memory chip into readable files. Without controller algorithm, data inside NAND chip looks like garbage
Looks like Mr. fix-it was the subject of his own possible can it be fixed video... I hope your finger is indeed fixed and a hope for a speedy recovery as well!
I never use chip based storage devices for backup purposes. The only way to make sure backup data is safe is to have a system that uses multiple hard drives in RAID which is expensive. So I use cloud storage.
Vince, In future, please open the USB drives to check they are legit, as people can make and hide capacitors in them which will kill your USB controllers in what ever machine you plug it in to, Keep up the great work bud!.
Man Vince, you're lucky it didn't cut all the way through! I was trying to judge from the length of the cast if you were missing your fingertip. Here's hoping it heals fast!
I brought two of these USB drive of 64GB each for 3 dollars, and that's brand new, from store, with 2 years warranty. I use them as bootable USB drives compilation made with with Ventoy.
Every drive has an index of the files written to it. When using recovery software it is possible to get the name and size of file listed, but the file itself has either been wiped completely of denuded to the point where it's irretrievable. It may seem you have 50GB worth of data, but in reality, at least 18GB of that has gone having been over-written as parts of other subsequently written files.
Nothing wrong with storing important data on SSDs, limited write cycles is actually not a problem because modern SSDs can survive many hundreds of TBs of writes (that is a lot, you're not likely to reach that by the time you upgrade) and does not wear out when it's read from, and the failure is more predictable (so you have plenty of time to back up your data) whereas a HDD can just fail without warning, sometimes within the first year. In my experience, SSDs last way longer than HDDs in normal use and are more reliable. The 500 GB SSD in my laptop has only 40 TB written after 6-7 years of constant use, and that is just a fraction of its rated lifespan. It should be good for decades, HDDs typically last less than 10 years of constant use. In the same amount of time I've replaced the HDD in the same laptop twice. And this laptop is kept stationary at home, I never bring it anywhere anymore, so the hard drive hasn't been subjected to forces that could damage it. Additionally, when SSDs do fail they are supposed to go read only but still let you access the data. There might be some corruption as some parts of the flash memory wore down and failed but the data should be largely recoverable, which is not always the case with HDDs. That is assuming the controller chip didn't fail, which is a possibility, the flash memory lasts so long that it might not be the thing that fails. But HDDs also have controller chips that can fail, they're just usually not the first thing to go because moving parts wear quicker. Another problem is bad sectors, something SSDs don't really struggle with. You can have a HDD that is otherwise fine and shows no signs of wear, until your data is suddenly randomly corrupted or becomes unreadable due to bad sectors. The corruption might be minor, but it can still affect important files. This can happen with both new and old drives, but counterintuitively it's less likely to happen with older drives. Random corruption/bad sectors is much less likely to happen with SSDs, I've yet to encounter it once. I did encounter it on the MicroSD card that used to be in my phone, that card eventually failed and went fully read only and that's when I noticed the corrupted files. And on a SD card that was only 6 months old, that was probably just bad luck. But never on a SSD, they have all been extremely reliable.
You could probably restore those drives using special manufacturer program for controller. All data will be lost, but you could get a working flash for non-critical files. Also if drive isn't detecting you can put it in a test mode by shorting data pins (D0 and D1 for example) when inserted into USB port (and remove shorting right after it).
@@PyhisPahis no, it makes a low level format to detect working areas. If you need to restore data - you probably even need another controller which allows direct access to the memory chip.
I've seen far worse injuries Vince. Get well soon. I work in hospitality so you can probably imagine how many ways you can injure yourself doing that job.
Hope you heal up quick Vince! It will keep pulling and feeling tight until the scar tissue softens up. Almost cut through the nerve in my last 2 fingers a few months ago. Just be gentle when that bandage is off, if you bend too much, it'll feel like it's on fire for a little while :)
While searching around for the chip types, I came across mentions of a "3S USB MP Utility" that may be able to fix the corruption on at least one of your sticks (not the one with the duff flash memory, obviously). Might be worth a shot. SSDs can be exceptionally reliable. You may not want to let them sit unpowered for years on end (keep them in a plastic bag with desiccant in the fridge or even freezer if you need to do that anyway), but generally you're not doing that. Some models are also just dogs with a controller chip that likes to corrupt itself (an issue with some cacheless Phison controllers) or have faulty firmware (e.g. if you have a Samsung 980 Pro, make sure it's up to date), and the elevated failure rate of particularly 1+ TB WD Blue / Sandisk Ultra 3Ds leads me to believe that those may have a controller overheating problem due to inadequate heat transfer (plastic case if memory serves - reflow / reball might be worth a shot). Samsung seems to have had some general issues with drives made in about the first half of 2021, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's all firmware-related. Particularly with cheap SSDs, you never quite know what you might get, e.g. the Kingston NV2 seems to be equipped either with TLC or QLC flash (yuck) and two different controllers of varying performance. I've never understood why people insist on skimping out on their storage devices. I must have gone through something like a dozen Samsung 850 Pros, both new and used, never had a problem with any of them. (I've read plenty of statements from people stating that their old 830s from 10 years ago still work fine, too. Haven't touched mine in a year.) Even the one I got used that turned out to have a lot of TBW on it (like 200 TBW on a 512 gig) recovered pretty OK after some TRIMming efforts. I always said that I would have been happy if SSDs basically kept the quality level of the 830s, which later became the Pro series. (Fun fact: I used to be hunting for used 850 Pros on eBay a few years ago, and the Pros went for no more or even less than the EVOs despite a considerable difference in new pricing, no doubt due to the EVO being the better-known product in the consumer space. I call that the "IKEA effect".) Meanwhile I've used some Crucial MX500s (the larger sizes of 1-2 TB are fine, the smaller ones can be a bit slow), and the handful of 250 gig WD Blues / Samsung Ultra 3Ds that I deployed have been fine, too. Speaking of TRIM, a lot of small USB thumb drives are using eMMC flash (potentially recycled from old phones, too) and are basically detected as an SD card in a cardreader, so SD formatting tools can be used on them. That's the only time an SD card will be TRIMmed. This can restore a lot of performance. Cheap thumb drives can be really cheap and nasty things in general, I don't really like the things much. Oh, and as someone who got a finger caught in a door before, I can fully relate. My injury at the time wasn't nearly as bad though, you seem to have gotten particularly unlucky with this ER special.
Put important data across an array of drives. If you have it on one drive, be it flash or mechanical, you are at risk of losing it. As well, mechanical drives have an unknowable failure rate. They can die in a day, a week, a month, a year, or a decade. SSDs generally live longer and are generally more reliable, however everything can break at any moment. So trusting one or the other isn't a good plan, so distributing your data across a range of drives is a better option. I do 3 backup HDDs in RAID 1 and then an SSD for active work.
ooch that finger! Its a good thing it was you that was testing that university drive. I know you will destroy it to protect the poor people who's info was just left on the drive. Really companies that use data like that need to firstly NOT put it on a flash drive which might get copied or pinched and secondly, have a way to completely wipe it out when its not needed any more. Not really surprised that you couldnt save the drives. I had some files sent to me to try and save from a camera memory(I didnt get the card). They were garbled mostly but after quite a lot of searching I found some progs that allowed me to grab back images for about half the lost pictures. Those data saving progs are miraculous.
It's a good way to learn how to deal with flash drives and their limitations. Btw, your voice reminds me a lot to the missed Rik Mayall when you talk softly.
What I like? The yellow mat and you and your videos. What I don't like? Your finger. Best wishes! P.S.: I mostly use a Linux live Stick to recover data. But it was interesting to see even the cmd commands for that.
@3:01 - I'll bet that the nail comes back in time. I once lost a full big toe nail after dropping a bike seat post directly on my toe (attached to a bike). It grew back like normal. I've lost a couple of finger nails and they're all back too.
Unless the memory chip is fried, these usb drives can be recovered using the correct MPT for the controller they use. Not everything is hardware related. Chipgenius is one of the tools that can help identify the controller.
Flash memory goes read only when it wears out, nothing you can do about that. At least, that's what's supposed to happen. Sometimes they will fail catastrophically and corrupt the data or become unreadable instead. So, those flash drives were unlikely to be fixable, most likely they've just failed due to old age. Flash drives and memory cards do not last very long compared to SSDs, they don't really have any wear leveling, so depending on the usage they will fail quickly.
Too bad about the finger Mate.. I know how you feel. I did same thing many years ago. I went to store that I been to for shopping. Must have open those doors about Million times. But One screwy Saturday - Bam the door swing so fast closes I didn't have the chance to react. It was just instinct to grab it, and Bammo- hit my Middle Finger (Slam the Tip too) Didn't lose the nail- nor Broken- but did cut into the tip- to the Bone- Lucky It was not my writing hand - or I would have a Bad 3 weeks. Hope you don't have to do any Physical Therapy - take all the Time you Need.
You can't write to HDs forever, they have an end of life as much as anything else. But while it was true for some years that the durability of mechanical HDs exceeded the durability of SSDs - by quite a bit at first - in the last few years it's mostly gone the other way around, at least, at the same levels of quality. The advantages HHDs have at this point is storage per cost, which is a genuine advantage, and in extreme data recovery cases, if you're willing to pay enough, you can have some _very_ expensive work done to reclaim platters from dead HHDs slotted into new cases (in a recovery centre, obviously) and have better odds of getting partial recovery. But in either case you're way better off having good backups on a RAID drive of some sort, with error recovery. That's what we do. It's worth it. And that's where we still use mechanical hard drives, because that's where the speed is partially made up for by parallelisation - enough that it's not an issue - and we get lots more storage per dollar.
6:06 i think the controller in the USB has marked the drive as read only (which is something that cannot be overridden as far as i know, and when the controller marks the drive as read only, the flash storage chips have reached the end of their operational life, I’m not entirely sure the exact thing that causes the controller to mark the drive read only, but i suspect that it does that primarily to prevent you from using a drive which could fail at any moment, and also to give you a chance to recover any data on it) I have a USB that is stuck in read only like that (which has a Windows ISO file on it, the actual ISO file that you would have been able to download from Microsoft, which i copied to it when i was trying to figure out what was going on with it, as it was acting up, and after i copied the file to it, it then became read only, and so I couldn’t format it, or do anything with it)
MPT (mass production tool) utilities can be used to reinitialise the controller and reformat the usb stick. If the problem is the memory chip, the stick will lock again, but most of the time the problem is with the fact the controller and its firmware suck.
Well done regardless Vince. You need to come up with a better story for your finger though. At least make it involve bear fighting at a minimum. 🤣 Only kidding.
DO NOT use HD to store important data. They are NOT meant to store files long term. They have moving parts that can easily fail inside and it's extremely expensive and unreliable to recover files from a dead HD if you really NEED them. The best solution for long term storage are TAPE Drives. But you can use Hard Drives, as long as you copy the data to newer drives periodically (every few years).
As tape drives are certainly great but not really something that most people can easily set up (considering the ones most can afford second hand use SCSI, sas or FC connections) I'd say buy an optical drive off Amazon and use that to achieve much the same. The key being that flash drives and hdd are not removable media drives, but tape and optical are, thus if the drive dies you can just use a new one. A usb bd burner off Amazon and a stack of 25GB discs will beat flash drives on costs and longevity fairly quickly. In fact if you don't mind having more discs and go for a dvd writer which can be had for £20 or less and a spindle of 50 or so 4GB discs you wipe the floor with the cost of multiple flash drives.
Ouch. I did something similar in my mid teens. By catching my thumb in the hinge section of a spring loaded pub door. As I'm completely stupid and numb to most things I didn't even realise I had caught my thumb till I tried walking away and realised I couldn't move lol. Everything then went in slow motion as I watched my thumb slowly get crushed by the door and got a lovely split thumb which to this day the scar is still visible. I refused medical treatment but regretted it that night when I went through a sleepless night of pain. The next day a nurse had to heat up a paperclip and burn a hole through the nail to release the build up of blood that had pooled under it. It was the first and only time my thumb came all over a nurse lol. About a week later the nail just dropped off .....oh yeah you're fixing some memory sticks, wasn't watching lol
Hope you finger gets better soon and thank for providing an excellent video as always despite the injury. It would be interesting to see if the flash was swaped on the read only drive, would the controller check the flash to see if its stable and open the drive, is the flash locked or the controller locked?
An USB thumb drive failed recently, but it was just a drive used for stuff like live CD, temporary files and it failed after trying to export my program list from an Android Sony Bravia TV. After plugging and unplugging it a few times in the TV and PC with safe remove, it did not even show up on my PC or any other PC I have (Windows/Linux). The really strange thing is that an LG TV with an OS before WebOS can see it and can write stuff to it. I tried to get it to show on older laptops, but it did not even show up on dmesg in Linux. It definitely is an idea to have more than 1 thumb drive and to try to move the storage chip from one to the other. I gave it to a friend and he told me that he was able to format it (but he has old laptops). I was wondering if older hardware might be more compatible in such situations, but my hardware is mostly 5 to maybe 7 years old, not older than that. By the way, recovery of files works like this. Most modern filesystems (NTFS, EXT4 and so on) have journaling (a list of files on it and where they are located). Whenever a file is deleted, the area occupied by it will be reported as free to the OS and will be overwritten. Undelete software reads up that file list and sees what files are reported as deleted, where they were located and sees if that area was overwritten or not. This is why some software reports the integrity of the file (the percentage that can be recovered). Some software like the one you are using will show the star on files that are most likely 100% recoverable. The file list can only hold a certain amount of files, but that list can surely exceed the actual space on the drive (especially if you have files of large sizes like media).
I have 2 Kinston USB drives dead on my table right now. One is read-only; the content can only be extracted with block read. The other one is the firmware emergency mode. Both will not be recovered. The USB sticks are becoming vulnerable, like 3,5" floppies in their last years.
People say that about SSD's but it's nonsense. The fact is that the mechanical part of a hard drive will fail well before an SSD will wear out. My cheap 1TB 660p has been in normal daily use for nearly 4 years and it still has 96% of it's rated life left. You can check how much life is left with an SSD.
Thumb drives are not nearly as robust though. They are made with much cheaper flash and simpler controllers, SD and Micro SD cards are another step down from that because of the size obviously.
Where do you find the tools to edit flash drives firmware and set the number of backup cells, redundancy and fix capacity? Is there any site that collects them for different chip manufacturers and how do you know what you have especially if it's a fake drive you're trying to fix that's misreporting?
Nice video Vince, I did not know about these chips having a life time. Also, I hope your mates make good fun of that accident you had. Try not to lose a finger next time you're cutting butter or strangle yourself while opening the pickle jar ;)
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
I think you could have shown the gory photo no problem. Can't be worse than the yellow mat 😀
😂😂
No the yellow map would cancel out the Gore photo. The yellow mat is so ugly any manual reviewer would skip that portion of the video.
Yellow mat does my head in.
😂
The yellow mat is the villain of the channel and after a while if he replaces the yellow mat, people are going to ask what happened to the yellow mat 😂
I suspect the 50gb found on a 32gb card is due to crosslinked files, some that were previously deleted, but partially overwritten, so that the recovery software believes it has found something valid (and it may indeed be partially recoverable) but it will likely be corrupted due to parts of the file 'belonging' to a different file.
Yes, that's exactly the case there.
You've inspired and motivated me to fix things as a hobby, and my kids love getting involved. Thank you for what you do, Vince.
Same here! Even started making videos about my fixes (or me trying to do so). We all should share things like that, because it may help people!
Yeah and I've bought tons of stuff on Amazon - but I still can't find a MMV branded Blue Mat or Vince's IPA 99.9% - why aren't those in the merch store?? 🤤
My dear Vince, sorry to hear of your mishap and hope you will be in the mend quickly. Great video as always. One note, most flash memory type devices actually have far far more raw storage than they sell for. If fact many have upwards of 500g raw capacity. During manufacturing they are tested for how much is in fact working and as such they are graded and this often determines the amount of storage they can safely be sold for. This is also why some unscrupulous manufacturers sell larger storage devices cheaper, because they sometimes sell closer to the amount tested as good. Out of the Safe amount they then divide that by some factor (usually 8 to 16) and that fraction will be what its sold as. The software in the controller in turn maps the good regions. After a certain number of writes failures start to appear. When this happens the data is remapped to one of the spare areas. This is what provides extended life for some of the more reputable brands. When the available good space becomes exhausted they become read only. Unfortunately often the most updated areas of the disk are the file descriptor blocks which contain the directory entries. As space becomes low, if it us unable to update these the root directory becomes corrupt making the device unreadable by the OS but yet still recoverable. Other times the are of the storage that holds the block map itself becomes corrupt rendering the entire device completely useless. It's a simplified explanation but gives you an idea of what is going on internally.
Great video! Wish you a speedy recovery! Note; in case you're unaware, normally in Windows command prompt, instead of typing back a previously entered command, you can just press the up arrow to get the command back saving you the time/effort
Horrible that you suffered that injury, Vince. All the best for the recovery. You’re absolutely right that your nail is missing, but it doesn’t mean it won’t grow back. If the nail bed is intact a new nail will grow. I’ve had it happen with a toe nail that came off. It’ll take a few months to fully grow back if it does. I hope the same happens during your recovery.
Think the 50GB showing on one of the drives is just because the recovery software uses a couple of different methods to look for files, and it has added together the results from both of those searches. So there will be duplicates between the two methods, where the same file has been found both ways. It probably can't tell for sure that the files are duplicates either as they might not be 100% complete or the metadata may be missing from them.
The methods are probably looking at what's left of the file allocation table (basically the index of files on the disk) and the other way would be to read through all the data sectors bit-by-bit and see what you come across
Oh that makes a lot of sense as the 4 movies on the other USB drive were listed twice but under slightly different headings. Thanks for clearing that up ekens 👍👍
Hope your finger gets better soon Vince! Sucks to have such an injury especially given you use your hands more often than most. Got my fingers crossed for you (put intended lol)
He should be able to get some compensation for that shouldn't vince❤️👍👌
@@jessede1970 I have 'Thumbs-ed up' (put intended lol)
In these failures that prevent formatting, there is an order to follow until one of them repairs it:
1.- Recover the data with programs like the one you have shown in the video.
2.- Use a disk editor like WinHex and delete the initial zones, partition and boot. Then try partitioning and formatting with Windows Disk Manager.
3.- Use low-level formatting programs that format the controller and the memory. Windows formatting only formats the memory. They are provided by the manufacturer of the flash drive. On the internet there are some like ALCOR that I used to correctly repair one.
Sorry to hear about your finger Vince, I hope the healing all goes well and wish you a speedy recovery.
Thank you Adam👍
Hey Vince I hope your finger heals up soon without any issues. although this was a non-fix I always enjoy your videos as every video is a learning experience.
I used to do a little data recovery work, when a thumb drive is read only that usually means that it has gone into protection mode for not having enough good cells to safely write data to, this is just to let you copy out data before it fails completely. You can change that with the manufacturing tool for the controller it is using.
How can I do that?
@@zZFlaviusBoss I have seen that some SSD recovery software do list that it can access hidden storage, so that might be the safe and legal way to do it, to get access to the programming software you technically have to get an ODM license from the supplier of the controller chip... buuuut, Google is a thing.
@@frozendude707 can you help me with this please it's my friend's USB and I gotta give it back to him? Do you have discord?
Wow. I wish you a speedy recovery, Vince.
I broke my knuckle once and I was due to fly out the next day. A&E had put my hand and forearm into a cast. That very night I cut the cast off because the airline would not have let me fly.
As soon as I landed I had it re-cast and it stayed on for the next 3 weeks then a splint for another 4 weeks.
Great effort Vince 👍👍. It's not a failure if you learn something in the process! Sorry to hear about your finger! Hope it gets better soon! Best wishes.
Thanks Mick 👍
A little tip when you're using CMD. You can get previous used commands when you use the up and down keys.
sorry to hear about your finger thats horible!
Hope it heals soon and good luck with your projects moving forward.
Irony of fixing thumb drives just about the size of a finger while recovering from the damage.
Thanks again for the great and wonderful educational content you make.
Remember a few months ago you said you want to travel to different techies' and do collabs? I'm moving soon, would be pretty cool if we could arrange something like that in the near future
Definitely up for that Phil 👍👍
Any updates on this collab!? Lol
Sorry to hear about your finger, Vince. I had to see a plastic surgeon a few years back. I fell whilst holding a cup and ending up severing the nerve to my index finger and also nicking the ligament. Thankfuly the ligament wasn't totally severed and they managed to reattach the nerve. The side of my finger was numb for quite some time, but as the nerve regenerated the feeling came back to about 90%. Being a musician, the worst part was not being able to play for a while.
Bit of a data breach with all that Uni info on it.
Sad to hear about your accident! When it comes to SSD, you can put important data on them, but make sure to have backup!
But backup is important even if you store your data on a hard-disk-drive! About the memory stick that is marked read only, the last thing you can try is to ( delete the volume ) and create a new one!
/Lifooz
A great point, there is no substitute for an offsite backup. Sure, a HDD may outlast an SSD, but they are both worthless if your house happens to go up in flames
I was in a reliability engineering position at a disc drive company for 34 years, and I was a bit appalled that once we got into SSD type drives, the SSDs would 'wear out' after heavy continuous writing. I've been gone from there for a number of years, but it looks like solid state storage hasn't improved as much as I would have expected.
They did get more reliable, but they started using more states for each cell rather than binary, so that lessened the time to failure back again, and the industry has continued with this, better flash that is then offset with more states, most cheap SSDs have 8 or more distinct levels per cell now. There are "pro" models that have SLC that have the reliability, but you have to pay way more for it.
HI Vince, have you tried solder both NANDS on the working drive to see if it doubles the memory?
Sorry about your finger! Hopefully you have a speedy recovery! Love the video's. Been a fan for many years!
I had a similar issue in the 2010s at a warehouse I worked at. I had determined the controller was firmware locked from malware that was going around the warehouse from people bringing in their drives when they weren't supposed to. I had to go to a sketchy Chinese site and get the firmware tool for the controller and do a firmware flash to it to get it working again. Note that the drive was only a few months old, so wasn't at its EOL fine frame.
Good attempt at fixing those thumbdrives. I hope your finger heals quickly, looks like you did quite a number. Being a natural born clutz through and through I've had my fair share of finger injuries among others. Luckily my husband is a nurse so I keep him on his toes.
I had a similar incident with a door , it hurt a lot son i understand what you are going through although mine only ended up with black nails , get well soon .
Those driving license files etc might be to do with a scam setup
Hi Vince ... I think I put it in the letter or messages. I bought four of them from ebay with the intention of playing around with them. one was blank, but I formatted it anyway. the rest just got thrown in a drawer ..... You had me panicking when the photos came up! ....... I will send you a link to the original ebay listing, if nothing, just to cover myself ... lol
I was wondering! 😂 Once again, thanks for sending these over Lee 👌😎
it still amazes me how far you have come sense i first started watching your vids .
Good grief, I did the same thing as a teenager to a baby toe. It was hanging from a shred of skin. I lost feeling in it but it looks just fine - they had a plastic surgeon reattach it as well.
That was the night I learned that plastic surgeons handle all kinds of skin trauma issues, from reattaching digits to removing scars after the dermatologist has removed skin cancers.
What a great commercial for the Kingston brand.
You are correct about not storing important data on SSD, but any drive can fail including traditional mechanical HDD. The important thing is to store multiple copies of your important data. The rule is 3-2-1 meaning 3 copies, on at least 2 different types of media (e.g. SSD and HDD), and 1 of the copies must be offsite. Use a backup program that runs automatically so you don't forget.
Which is why I use optical. I don't have to worry about an optical discs firmware mucking up the media lol. Thus I store all archival data to Bd-r, backed up to tape (simply because I can) and uploaded to the cloud as a last resort (which will cost the earth to recover thus it is literally the very last resort).
Non archive data is kept on HDD's backed up to a NAS, which is next to the front door so if I have to escape the house I can grab the Nas too!
@@dlarge6502 CDs and DVDs can rot especially the really cheap brands. But even saying that, Phillips CD-R here are like... $3 for about 50 lol
So sorry to hear about your finger. Hope you have a speedy recovery.
You are being too harsh on yourself when you call this a failure. You should call it a non-fixable. Good Job Vince!
Love the yellow mat! Hope you are healing well. I once tried to use an awl to clean gunk from a small space and it somehow slipped, flew upwards and split my thumb open an inch lengthways on the side, proper deep cut, so you have my sympathies!
Talking about near severed fingers I almost lost the tip of my left index finger while splitting woods for kindling with a hatchet. The break in the bone was at a angle which means that the surgeon had to grind down the two bones to make them level and a titanium rod to stabilize the bones. Now it looks like it alot better now while it shorter so I can count 9.75 fingers
I've also read that not only are there write limits of flash, but SSD's will also slowly "rot" if they're unused. Not physically rot, but the data will slowly be corrupted. The flash memory cells eventually leak so a written-to-only-once SSD is still not suitable for archive purposes. The extra storage is also part of the approach to extend life of the devices. Flash storage controllers have "wear levelling" logic in them so that some cells may be worn out from extended use and they end up being mapped to fresh cells, transparently.
Oh my!! I am sorry for your injury. Get better soon! I very much enjoy your videos.
One thing that might help with the SSD; I don't know if this is implemented by Kingston, but most Sata SSDs have a "recovery mode" that starts when you only plug in power and not the data connector. Usually it would take 3-5 attempts of only plugging in power and leaving it for a minute or two. Not sure if that is possible with your sata to usb adapter though.
all the best for you and for your finger. get well soon.
I love this video, Vince! But I highly recommend having a trash computer to do USB drive testing from unknown or partially known sources. Never plug it into anything connected to the internet or anything with any real data on it.
I agree, and completely erase the computer after you do, some viruses/ransomware stay dormant for a while.
I understand your pain and frustration with not being able to work at your usual 100% as am sitting here at home watching your video and nursing a fracture and a dislocated shoulder ☹
Once a USB drive goes read-only, you can't re-enable it using Windows because it's a decision made by the drive's controller and not Windows itself. Depending on the drive controller, however, you might be able to give it a second life by using the respective controller's MPTool (Mass Production tool) which the manufacturer would have used to setup the drive in the factory. There are the USBDEV forums (in Russian) which have a lot of info about this sort of stuff.
Is there any place in English to find those mpt tools? There's so much fake flash memory out there and as far as I know this is the only way to repair them. Also as I understand it you can use such software to choose to set these devices to a lower capacity by increasing spare and redundant cells to increase reliability. Ideally that's what I would like to do!
@@petevenuti7355 Most mass production tools are switchable between Chinese/English. If you're talking about UsbDev, Google Translate is probably your best bet. I personally use the auto google translate feature of Chromium-based browsers while browsing the site.
If you're using linux, you don't need any special manufacturer programs. Windows severely limits what you can do with your hardware.
That's a gpd pocket he has... It's pretty crap piece of hardware, but it does have support for Linux.
@@runed0s86 if you can write a hardware driver with direct access does it really matter what OS?
I'm asking what's software exists that can edit those firmware parameters that are in English that I might get my hands on.. I don't care what OS... I just want to be the script Kiddie here, where most of the hard work is already done...
To get all the information I would need do it myself it, things would change too much and not be relevant by the time I completed the project ...
Speaking of, I like OS\2 , I got a lot of catching up to do..
Sorry about your hand! A lot of people wouldn't bother being courteous and try to prevent a door from slamming, so kudos, even if it bit you in the end!
Sorry to hear about your finger Vince! It could be worse, when I had an accident the plastic surgeon kept my finger 😅
Big yikes about the finger. And here I thought I had it rough when I levered off a toe nail last week, but that's on another level. Hope you'll recover quickly!
What a pleasure to watch your videos. I some of these just for writing once and then just reading from them.
Physical hard disks are just as likely to fail. Thanks for the video.
I'm sorry about your finger, Vince. I hope that nail-bed is not too badly damaged. I sliced the end off my finger in a gate when I was 7 and the nail has grown back annoyingly unevenly ever since. It bugs me to this day. I suspect the plastic surgeons are better today than they were nearly 50 years ago
12:05 if an entry isn't there you add it manually. I'd say a lot of the time people go into regedit the entry they're there to change isn't even there by default, I remember it being that way for me
Vince, I’d be skeptical about plugging any usb devices into my main computer. If I’d somehow bridged something while soldering I’d worry of something damaging the controller on my motherboard and killing usb functionality. Maybe an adapter,pci express card or less important pc.
In regards to incorrect space showing for recovered files, these are likely just the totals of the file headers that the software found. All this data will not be recoverable and will be partially or fully damaged. I know I’ve seen specialists hook up the flash memory chips to independent socket readers and recover data that way, but you’d have to Google it.
After watching hours of data recovery videos, I know that you should always buy two flash drives. One is unused, act like doner for controller. You need the same controller model, version, series, firmware installed. Only controller got algorithm how to scramble data across NAND memory. If controller is dead and doner board isn't available - you need to connect directly into NAND memory chip using low level NAND protocol and lab tool called PC-3000. Then this tool got database of controller algorithm and firmware, so can mock controller behavior to merge data across whole NAND memory chip into readable files. Without controller algorithm, data inside NAND chip looks like garbage
Speedy recovery Vince! Your nail should grow back.
Looks like Mr. fix-it was the subject of his own possible can it be fixed video... I hope your finger is indeed fixed and a hope for a speedy recovery as well!
When you get your bandage off used moisturiser cream so you don’t get problems with scar tissue or hard skin.
It all comes down to having back ups on multiple drives regardless of type as they all have failure modes.
I never use chip based storage devices for backup purposes. The only way to make sure backup data is safe is to have a system that uses multiple hard drives in RAID which is expensive. So I use cloud storage.
Vince, In future, please open the USB drives to check they are legit, as people can make and hide capacitors in them which will kill your USB controllers in what ever machine you plug it in to, Keep up the great work bud!.
Man Vince, you're lucky it didn't cut all the way through! I was trying to judge from the length of the cast if you were missing your fingertip. Here's hoping it heals fast!
I brought two of these USB drive of 64GB each for 3 dollars, and that's brand new, from store, with 2 years warranty. I use them as bootable USB drives compilation made with with Ventoy.
Every drive has an index of the files written to it. When using recovery software it is possible to get the name and size of file listed, but the file itself has either been wiped completely of denuded to the point where it's irretrievable. It may seem you have 50GB worth of data, but in reality, at least 18GB of that has gone having been over-written as parts of other subsequently written files.
Sorry to hear about the finger.
I did wonder were the videos were this week. Hope it heals quickly, for your sake not ours.
Take more care & sue em!!!
Nothing wrong with storing important data on SSDs, limited write cycles is actually not a problem because modern SSDs can survive many hundreds of TBs of writes (that is a lot, you're not likely to reach that by the time you upgrade) and does not wear out when it's read from, and the failure is more predictable (so you have plenty of time to back up your data) whereas a HDD can just fail without warning, sometimes within the first year.
In my experience, SSDs last way longer than HDDs in normal use and are more reliable. The 500 GB SSD in my laptop has only 40 TB written after 6-7 years of constant use, and that is just a fraction of its rated lifespan. It should be good for decades, HDDs typically last less than 10 years of constant use. In the same amount of time I've replaced the HDD in the same laptop twice. And this laptop is kept stationary at home, I never bring it anywhere anymore, so the hard drive hasn't been subjected to forces that could damage it.
Additionally, when SSDs do fail they are supposed to go read only but still let you access the data. There might be some corruption as some parts of the flash memory wore down and failed but the data should be largely recoverable, which is not always the case with HDDs. That is assuming the controller chip didn't fail, which is a possibility, the flash memory lasts so long that it might not be the thing that fails. But HDDs also have controller chips that can fail, they're just usually not the first thing to go because moving parts wear quicker.
Another problem is bad sectors, something SSDs don't really struggle with. You can have a HDD that is otherwise fine and shows no signs of wear, until your data is suddenly randomly corrupted or becomes unreadable due to bad sectors. The corruption might be minor, but it can still affect important files. This can happen with both new and old drives, but counterintuitively it's less likely to happen with older drives.
Random corruption/bad sectors is much less likely to happen with SSDs, I've yet to encounter it once. I did encounter it on the MicroSD card that used to be in my phone, that card eventually failed and went fully read only and that's when I noticed the corrupted files. And on a SD card that was only 6 months old, that was probably just bad luck. But never on a SSD, they have all been extremely reliable.
You could probably restore those drives using special manufacturer program for controller. All data will be lost, but you could get a working flash for non-critical files. Also if drive isn't detecting you can put it in a test mode by shorting data pins (D0 and D1 for example) when inserted into USB port (and remove shorting right after it).
flashing the controller wouldn't affect the memory, you'd still be able to recover data that was written to it
@@PyhisPahis no, it makes a low level format to detect working areas. If you need to restore data - you probably even need another controller which allows direct access to the memory chip.
I'm so sorry to hear about your finger, Vince!
I've seen far worse injuries Vince. Get well soon. I work in hospitality so you can probably imagine how many ways you can injure yourself doing that job.
Hope you heal up quick Vince!
It will keep pulling and feeling tight until the scar tissue softens up. Almost cut through the nerve in my last 2 fingers a few months ago.
Just be gentle when that bandage is off, if you bend too much, it'll feel like it's on fire for a little while :)
While searching around for the chip types, I came across mentions of a "3S USB MP Utility" that may be able to fix the corruption on at least one of your sticks (not the one with the duff flash memory, obviously). Might be worth a shot.
SSDs can be exceptionally reliable. You may not want to let them sit unpowered for years on end (keep them in a plastic bag with desiccant in the fridge or even freezer if you need to do that anyway), but generally you're not doing that. Some models are also just dogs with a controller chip that likes to corrupt itself (an issue with some cacheless Phison controllers) or have faulty firmware (e.g. if you have a Samsung 980 Pro, make sure it's up to date), and the elevated failure rate of particularly 1+ TB WD Blue / Sandisk Ultra 3Ds leads me to believe that those may have a controller overheating problem due to inadequate heat transfer (plastic case if memory serves - reflow / reball might be worth a shot). Samsung seems to have had some general issues with drives made in about the first half of 2021, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's all firmware-related. Particularly with cheap SSDs, you never quite know what you might get, e.g. the Kingston NV2 seems to be equipped either with TLC or QLC flash (yuck) and two different controllers of varying performance. I've never understood why people insist on skimping out on their storage devices.
I must have gone through something like a dozen Samsung 850 Pros, both new and used, never had a problem with any of them. (I've read plenty of statements from people stating that their old 830s from 10 years ago still work fine, too. Haven't touched mine in a year.) Even the one I got used that turned out to have a lot of TBW on it (like 200 TBW on a 512 gig) recovered pretty OK after some TRIMming efforts. I always said that I would have been happy if SSDs basically kept the quality level of the 830s, which later became the Pro series. (Fun fact: I used to be hunting for used 850 Pros on eBay a few years ago, and the Pros went for no more or even less than the EVOs despite a considerable difference in new pricing, no doubt due to the EVO being the better-known product in the consumer space. I call that the "IKEA effect".) Meanwhile I've used some Crucial MX500s (the larger sizes of 1-2 TB are fine, the smaller ones can be a bit slow), and the handful of 250 gig WD Blues / Samsung Ultra 3Ds that I deployed have been fine, too.
Speaking of TRIM, a lot of small USB thumb drives are using eMMC flash (potentially recycled from old phones, too) and are basically detected as an SD card in a cardreader, so SD formatting tools can be used on them. That's the only time an SD card will be TRIMmed. This can restore a lot of performance. Cheap thumb drives can be really cheap and nasty things in general, I don't really like the things much.
Oh, and as someone who got a finger caught in a door before, I can fully relate. My injury at the time wasn't nearly as bad though, you seem to have gotten particularly unlucky with this ER special.
What a shame about your finger. Hope it heals well and maybe hopefully your nail grows back. Best wishes!
Sorry to hear about what happened to your finger, hope it gets better soon!
I also now have a feer of doors 😆
Oh my gosh Vince! My wife and I are so sorry to hear about your finger. Please take good care of it buddy.
Put important data across an array of drives. If you have it on one drive, be it flash or mechanical, you are at risk of losing it. As well, mechanical drives have an unknowable failure rate. They can die in a day, a week, a month, a year, or a decade. SSDs generally live longer and are generally more reliable, however everything can break at any moment. So trusting one or the other isn't a good plan, so distributing your data across a range of drives is a better option.
I do 3 backup HDDs in RAID 1 and then an SSD for active work.
ooch that finger! Its a good thing it was you that was testing that university drive. I know you will destroy it to protect the poor people who's info was just left on the drive. Really companies that use data like that need to firstly NOT put it on a flash drive which might get copied or pinched and secondly, have a way to completely wipe it out when its not needed any more. Not really surprised that you couldnt save the drives. I had some files sent to me to try and save from a camera memory(I didnt get the card). They were garbled mostly but after quite a lot of searching I found some progs that allowed me to grab back images for about half the lost pictures. Those data saving progs are miraculous.
Yellow mat, OH YEAHHHHH. Vince's Mangled Finger, OH NOOOOO. That's gnarly. I hope it heals up nicely.
It's a good way to learn how to deal with flash drives and their limitations. Btw, your voice reminds me a lot to the missed Rik Mayall when you talk softly.
What I like? The yellow mat and you and your videos. What I don't like? Your finger. Best wishes!
P.S.: I mostly use a Linux live Stick to recover data. But it was interesting to see even the cmd commands for that.
@3:01 - I'll bet that the nail comes back in time. I once lost a full big toe nail after dropping a bike seat post directly on my toe (attached to a bike). It grew back like normal. I've lost a couple of finger nails and they're all back too.
Ohh man the finger bit kinda freaked me out a little. Hope they can fix you up mate ... take it easy man
Unless the memory chip is fried, these usb drives can be recovered using the correct MPT for the controller they use.
Not everything is hardware related.
Chipgenius is one of the tools that can help identify the controller.
Well ouch that sounds painful i hope you recover soon and i hope your finger's ok
Flash memory goes read only when it wears out, nothing you can do about that. At least, that's what's supposed to happen. Sometimes they will fail catastrophically and corrupt the data or become unreadable instead.
So, those flash drives were unlikely to be fixable, most likely they've just failed due to old age. Flash drives and memory cards do not last very long compared to SSDs, they don't really have any wear leveling, so depending on the usage they will fail quickly.
Ouch , speedy recovery Vince .
I hope your finger heals quickly. Beware of strange doors. Some of them have bad attitudes.
Too bad about the finger Mate.. I know how you feel. I did same thing many years ago. I went to store that I been to for shopping. Must have open those doors about Million times. But One screwy Saturday - Bam the door swing so fast closes I didn't have the chance to react. It was just instinct to grab it, and Bammo- hit my Middle Finger (Slam the Tip too) Didn't lose the nail- nor Broken- but did cut into the tip- to the Bone- Lucky It was not my writing hand - or I would have a Bad 3 weeks. Hope you don't have to do any Physical Therapy - take all the Time you Need.
You can't write to HDs forever, they have an end of life as much as anything else. But while it was true for some years that the durability of mechanical HDs exceeded the durability of SSDs - by quite a bit at first - in the last few years it's mostly gone the other way around, at least, at the same levels of quality.
The advantages HHDs have at this point is storage per cost, which is a genuine advantage, and in extreme data recovery cases, if you're willing to pay enough, you can have some _very_ expensive work done to reclaim platters from dead HHDs slotted into new cases (in a recovery centre, obviously) and have better odds of getting partial recovery.
But in either case you're way better off having good backups on a RAID drive of some sort, with error recovery. That's what we do. It's worth it. And that's where we still use mechanical hard drives, because that's where the speed is partially made up for by parallelisation - enough that it's not an issue - and we get lots more storage per dollar.
i used raspberry PI imager ...put in usb..."erase usb option"...job done!
Somewhat ironic that you get 3 thumb drives to fix while having a busted finger of your own, hope it heals quickly and is no longer too painful.
6:06 i think the controller in the USB has marked the drive as read only (which is something that cannot be overridden as far as i know, and when the controller marks the drive as read only, the flash storage chips have reached the end of their operational life, I’m not entirely sure the exact thing that causes the controller to mark the drive read only, but i suspect that it does that primarily to prevent you from using a drive which could fail at any moment, and also to give you a chance to recover any data on it)
I have a USB that is stuck in read only like that (which has a Windows ISO file on it, the actual ISO file that you would have been able to download from Microsoft, which i copied to it when i was trying to figure out what was going on with it, as it was acting up, and after i copied the file to it, it then became read only, and so I couldn’t format it, or do anything with it)
Thanks Pineapple 👍👍
Was preparing to write something similar. The memory inside the sticks is past it's lifetime or the controller has failed
i had the same issue but with microsd card
flash media storage is more susceptible to that issues
MPT (mass production tool) utilities can be used to reinitialise the controller and reformat the usb stick.
If the problem is the memory chip, the stick will lock again, but most of the time the problem is with the fact the controller and its firmware suck.
Well done regardless Vince. You need to come up with a better story for your finger though. At least make it involve bear fighting at a minimum. 🤣 Only kidding.
I know!! The jokes are already coming in from my friends about being aware of doors...it's one scar I will NOT be recounting how it happened 😂
@@Mymatevince well at least it wasn't ajar. Badum Tish 🥁
I'm done after that one. Truly hope it heals well. Best wishes!
😂
DO NOT use HD to store important data. They are NOT meant to store files long term. They have moving parts that can easily fail inside and it's extremely expensive and unreliable to recover files from a dead HD if you really NEED them. The best solution for long term storage are TAPE Drives. But you can use Hard Drives, as long as you copy the data to newer drives periodically (every few years).
As tape drives are certainly great but not really something that most people can easily set up (considering the ones most can afford second hand use SCSI, sas or FC connections) I'd say buy an optical drive off Amazon and use that to achieve much the same. The key being that flash drives and hdd are not removable media drives, but tape and optical are, thus if the drive dies you can just use a new one.
A usb bd burner off Amazon and a stack of 25GB discs will beat flash drives on costs and longevity fairly quickly. In fact if you don't mind having more discs and go for a dvd writer which can be had for £20 or less and a spindle of 50 or so 4GB discs you wipe the floor with the cost of multiple flash drives.
Ouch. I did something similar in my mid teens. By catching my thumb in the hinge section of a spring loaded pub door. As I'm completely stupid and numb to most things I didn't even realise I had caught my thumb till I tried walking away and realised I couldn't move lol. Everything then went in slow motion as I watched my thumb slowly get crushed by the door and got a lovely split thumb which to this day the scar is still visible. I refused medical treatment but regretted it that night when I went through a sleepless night of pain. The next day a nurse had to heat up a paperclip and burn a hole through the nail to release the build up of blood that had pooled under it. It was the first and only time my thumb came all over a nurse lol. About a week later the nail just dropped off .....oh yeah you're fixing some memory sticks, wasn't watching lol
Hope you finger gets better soon and thank for providing an excellent video as always despite the injury. It would be interesting to see if the flash was swaped on the read only drive, would the controller check the flash to see if its stable and open the drive, is the flash locked or the controller locked?
An USB thumb drive failed recently, but it was just a drive used for stuff like live CD, temporary files and it failed after trying to export my program list from an Android Sony Bravia TV. After plugging and unplugging it a few times in the TV and PC with safe remove, it did not even show up on my PC or any other PC I have (Windows/Linux). The really strange thing is that an LG TV with an OS before WebOS can see it and can write stuff to it. I tried to get it to show on older laptops, but it did not even show up on dmesg in Linux. It definitely is an idea to have more than 1 thumb drive and to try to move the storage chip from one to the other. I gave it to a friend and he told me that he was able to format it (but he has old laptops). I was wondering if older hardware might be more compatible in such situations, but my hardware is mostly 5 to maybe 7 years old, not older than that.
By the way, recovery of files works like this. Most modern filesystems (NTFS, EXT4 and so on) have journaling (a list of files on it and where they are located). Whenever a file is deleted, the area occupied by it will be reported as free to the OS and will be overwritten. Undelete software reads up that file list and sees what files are reported as deleted, where they were located and sees if that area was overwritten or not. This is why some software reports the integrity of the file (the percentage that can be recovered). Some software like the one you are using will show the star on files that are most likely 100% recoverable. The file list can only hold a certain amount of files, but that list can surely exceed the actual space on the drive (especially if you have files of large sizes like media).
You should try kingston format utility. It can fix corrupted flash drives
Yes it can reprogram certain models that have decided to put themselves into read only state by accident
I have 2 Kinston USB drives dead on my table right now. One is read-only; the content can only be extracted with block read. The other one is the firmware emergency mode. Both will not be recovered. The USB sticks are becoming vulnerable, like 3,5" floppies in their last years.
Woot !! Another Vince fixing Video 🥰❤️😍
For flash drives, you can use low format tool software to proceed with advanced format better than one provides windows
You can do that with normal drivers to
There is a kingston format utility for difficult cases.
People say that about SSD's but it's nonsense. The fact is that the mechanical part of a hard drive will fail well before an SSD will wear out. My cheap 1TB 660p has been in normal daily use for nearly 4 years and it still has 96% of it's rated life left. You can check how much life is left with an SSD.
Thumb drives are not nearly as robust though. They are made with much cheaper flash and simpler controllers, SD and Micro SD cards are another step down from that because of the size obviously.
Where do you find the tools to edit flash drives firmware and set the number of backup cells, redundancy and fix capacity? Is there any site that collects them for different chip manufacturers and how do you know what you have especially if it's a fake drive you're trying to fix that's misreporting?
Hope the finger heals quickly Vince.
Nice video Vince, I did not know about these chips having a life time.
Also, I hope your mates make good fun of that accident you had. Try not to lose a finger next time you're cutting butter or strangle yourself while opening the pickle jar ;)