>Memory Stick Classic stores all per-device management info in the Boot Block and in the Backup Boot Block. They are written in the factory and never erased/programmed again. Erasing them both will render a memory stick inoperative and make recovery rather hard, espcially if the data they contained is lost.

This also sounds like Memory Stick flash fraud would have been trivially easy; on SD cards you at least need to know the special private commands to reprogram the SD card controller.