Chipsbnk Hard Drive Unusable

I bought a 2 TB portable hard drive last year, from Amazon.
I wanted to use it to back up my pc for an upgrade to Windows 1o.
It came formatted in Fat 32. ...I thought it would be better for my backup if I changed it to NTFS.
I tried doing it on Windows, but would not complete. Then it was unformatted, so I had to install a program to reformat it to fat32. That worked, but just barely.

It was usable for awhile, but a little slow and buggy during use.
Then, when I restarted the computer one day with the drive still plugged into the usb port, something odd happened, and when I checked the drive for content, nothing was listed.
Everything was gone. Now, it's just listed as a USB drive,,,when I click on the icon to open it, it asks me to please insert a disc into the drive!

It will not format at all, even programs like Mini Tool Partition Wizard don't recognize it; it's not even listed.
It is listed with the Windows partition manager, but it gives no options to format it from there.

I have spotted something odd in the properties for the drive. It is listing a driver installed from "Avast Software". I have no idea how it got there. I do have Avast antivirus software installed, but I do not have the driver update component installed on my laptop...that's an extra feature I don't need. It was never there.
Is Avast causing the problem with the drive? If I try to update the driver, it tells me the latest driver is installed.

 

No, you bought a flash drive. From searching for the company Chipsbnk, I see they only make flash drives.

2TB portable hard drives come formatted as NTFS. I own three of them. In fact my 500GB and 1TB portable hard drives are also formatted as NTSF.

Flash drives are not as durable as portable hard drives. You might have better success not using a flash drive but using an actual protable hard drive.

See if there is anything useful here
https://rdtk.net/hardware/how-you-can-recover-a-chipsbnk-memory-stick/

Here is a collection of drivers. (I've used drivers from this site myself) It worries me that the drivers are dated 2006!
https://www.pcmatic.com/company/lib...sp?driver=ChipsBnk~Flash~Disk~USB~Device.html

 

Sorry for any confusion about the drive, but I was under the impression it was a portable hard drive because that's the way it was listed on Amazon.

Thanks for all the help with it, it will take some time to go through it all to see if anything works.
Still have no idea how that driver is listed coming from Avast, though.

 

Why does it say Brand Ulita?
So it is NOT a Chipsbnk drive as you indicated. It is a USB C connected hard drive that might not be 2 TB.

I can't find any information on Ulita brand. I'll have to dig deeper.

I found a review for the pink version of the Ulita and they aren't very favorable.
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B07WPS681D

I usually read reviews from a few different sources (not just Amazon) before I decide if I want to spend $$$ on something.

 

I called it a Chipsbnk drive because that's what it was called in the properties for the drive. Those reviews don't look very favourable, I agree. One review said there was much less hard drive space available than advertised...that's the feeling I got from the one I had.
I bought it from Amazon.ca; I didn't think they sold absolute crap...but that may be the case. They don't accept Paypal as payment, either, so I was left to dealing with Amazon. That seller wanted me to ship it back to them...that's at least $20 here in Canada. I got pissed with the whole thing...I can't recommend Amazon anymore.

 

Although they cost more, stick with a name brand item when you buy an external portable hard drive. I own 8 Western Digital external hard drives. My first one is very old and one of those huge things that has a separate power supply. It also doesn't hold much compared to the new smaller ones. I think it is 80 GB. I took all my old programs that were on floppies and stored them on this, then I formatted and threw the floppy disks away.

See if you can find something like this on Amazon Canada
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-Portable-External/dp/B06W55K9N6

Note there are over 95,000 reviews and the rating is more than 4 stars.

Looking at your image in post 1 that says Chipsbnk flash drive, I think they took the casing for a portable hard drive and put in a flash drive. Something underhanded was done to the hardware you bought.

 

It doesn't look like a legitimate product to me, either. There were no instructions or any kind of documentation with it, just a small shipment paper noting the product number from Amazon.
I checked on Amazon.ca for the drive you recommended; it's there...about $75. It's going to cost more here due to dollar currency exchange.

I did some checking on where the drivers are for the Chipsdbnk drive, and it's giving me a description of a "Avast Anti Rootkit Filter" listed at the top. I have no idea how it got there, what its for, or how to get rid of it. Can that be deleted, or removed?

 

Sorry, I have no idea if the Avast item can be removed.
When I search for Avast anti rootkit filter, all I seem to get is how to use Avast to remove rootkits and not what the item actually is.

So far I have never gotten a fake device so I have zero experience in dealing with anything on such a unit.