Fix a Fake Kingston Data Traveler 150 64GB USB Flash Drive

As I wrote in my last article here, I had purchased a fake Kingston Data Traveler 150 64GB USB Flash Drive from eBay.

Counterfeiter's are reprogramming various size USB flash drives to show a larger capacity than is actually available, even though Windows might seem to be reporting the correct capacity of the drive, that information isnt actually proving it is 64GB flash drive. Fortunately there are tools available to prove the size and fix it back to it's original capacity.

To determine if the drive is fake:

First I opened my case, these cheap fake USB drives come apart easily! Notice the picture to the right, the non functional LED and how far away the actual LED cover is! The chip visible is a memory controller and if that board is flipped, the other side has a larger memory chip in the same place.

I then determined the memory controller chipset used and memory model and googled for tools to use to fix the drive, I came across lots of other people that had repaired theirs too.

Your next step is to check the drive is fake would be to run H2testw this tool will check the drive for fake capacity and then verify the correct capacity.

Tip: As it checks slow I generally let it check up to 9GB then I verified the data after. H2testw will only verify the data up until the point it reaches the original storage capacity of the flash disk, on mine it got stuck at 3.9GB the rest of the data being checked after was bad. This figure is your actual original disk size.

I then used Chipgenius to determine the chipset type, PID and VID codes. These are important for the next step to know which version of Utools to use. If you notice the USB device called Udisk in the image on the right, this is from where I had already repaired the flash disk afterwards, please ignore!.

The next step after loading Chipgenius is to then use Utools, there are so many different versions of this software but I found this version worked for me. If you get the error "Download scan code failed!" you need to download the correct version for your chipset. Some people report you should run it under XP, but it should run fine under Windows 7 in Windows XP mode.

Utools will identify your chipset and then if you click on your drive it will format it back to its original capacity.

As you can see in the picture on the right after about 30 mins it has formatted my flash drive to the original capacity of 4GB (not 64GB!). So instead of throwing it in the bin, the flash drive now works, and is actually useable!

Good luck with yours! All information for various chipsets can be found searching on google.