After I failed to fix that old USB memory, my friend suggested a brain transplant: swap the Flash chip from the dead stick into a new one. That has a low chance of success because the innards will be different for every manufacturer and, even for USB sticks of the same vintage, nothing remains the same from lot to lot.
Anyhow, I removed the fancy end caps from the donor stick, which looks to be swag from a medical conference:
The key step is to crack the case open without damaging anything inside. This technique works wonderfully well:
Grab diagonally opposing corners in a bench vise and slowly increase the clamping force until the case snaps apart. Poke a screwdriver in the gap, remove the case from the vise, and pry the thing open.
As it turned out, the innards were completely different: different Flash controllers and different Flash memory chips. So it goes.
Not surprisingly, you can find the data sheets / manuals / configuration utilities for the Flash controller chips by searching for the obvious keywords. Machine translation is your friend…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
2 responses to “Opening a USB Stick”
Ouch, that’s tough problem, you would have to get a controller IC of the same type, or read the memory IC directly via a separate circuit (and then somehow decode the data via a flash recovery tool like photorec on linux)
Note the link to the orig post has a typo, there is an extra “http//” in it.
Have a happy winter holiday season of your choosing.
Regards
Yeah, we knew it couldn’t possibly work, but …
WordPress now has a handy look-up-the-previous-post linkifier, but it pre-fills the URL field with a highlighted-for-editing http://. One little finger fumble while pasting a link removes the highlighting and, of course, the dialog box is so small you can’t see the entire URL at once.