[engineer]

Hello Everybody!

I have a question that I wanted to ask you in regards to a case

We have a sandisk device that used to have U3 capabilities. The Customer say's that they got rid of the U3 utility when they bought the device. This device has a 00-162-1 controller.

The device is experiencing the "Format Error Message", we tried a NAND swap with another device, we tried a controller swap as well; and every single time we are still getting the "Format Error Message".

When you plug the device in, you can view the actual device size in the Management console (4GB), but every time we do a scan there is 0 files found.

When viewing the drive in Winhex, all data is 0000000's, but when scrolling down through the data the device starts freezing up and the data starts reading "Cannot Read Sectors". All of this sounds as though there might be an issue with the code on the memory chip. Maybe the controller is looking for the U3 software, but cannot locate it and that is why it malfunctions? Or maybe, the MBR?? Any ideas at all on this case? This customer really needs the data; and we are running out of options as the problem seems to lie in the memory chip itself.

What do you think of this idea, maybe pull the memory chip off; dump the data from it. Also, pull an identical memory chip off from duplicate working device with working u3 utility. See if we can locate the actual U3 coding in the duplicate working memory chip, copy it and save it (U3 code) onto the actual non-working memory chip; then solder it all back onto a working board.

Think that this could possibly work?

[Mike]

Try copying the patiend NAND flash contents to the donor. It may be bad blocks that is stopping the original.

May also be worth trying the donor NAND on the patient pcb too.

[engineer]