The thesis, the payroll run, the only copy of the accounts — on a stick that caught the edge of a desk or gave up halfway through a copy. This is small parcel work, which suits a county of long drives nicely: an envelope posted anywhere in Norfolk today is on the bench tomorrow morning. Snapped necks, dead controllers and deleted folders all have a way back, and most of them begin with somebody stopping trying different sockets.
Every usb stick / flash drive job is diagnosed free. The quote follows in writing, fixed, before a screwdriver is picked up.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
The first job on any usb stick / flash drive is matching the symptom to the fault — and after twenty-odd years, these thirty account for very nearly everything that comes through the door.
A knee, a bag strap, a chair pushed in without looking. Leverage always wins. Rebuilt under the microscope where the board allows it, and read straight from the memory where it does not.
The stick enumerates and then talks nonsense, which is the controller or its firmware failing rather than the data going anywhere. The files have not moved an inch.
The controller has woken up with no map of its own memory. Reading the chips directly and rebuilding the mapping in software puts the two back in touch.
A torn file table sitting above intact files. Decline it flatly, take the stick out, and post it in exactly the state it is in now.
Recoverable right up until the freed space is reused, and not one moment past that. The safest place for the stick from here is a drawer rather than a port.
Something has shorted and it is slowly cooking itself. Take it out. Every minute it spends warm in a port is spent out of whatever margin is left.
A stick left upright in a socket turns into a lever with a long arm and a lot of patience. The solder joints fracture; the memory chips generally never notice.
There is no separate package to lift on these. Mapped test points are probed instead, which is a slower road to precisely the same files.
Twice, in one memorable case. Cleaned and dried out properly on the bench, laundered sticks fare better than their owners dare hope. The one thing that ruins it is plugging a damp stick in to check.
Everything replaced by lookalike links after a spell in a shared machine. The genuine folders are usually sitting hidden underneath the deception, entirely intact.
The marketplace classic. Writes fold back over the real chip once it fills, so what landed before the loop carves out cleanly and what came after was never written down anywhere.
The SDCZ50 has two well-known exits: the neck snapping at the root of the plug, and a sudden drop to 0MB. There are standing routines here for both, and neither is unusual.
Kingston's Exodia DTX and the older DT100 G3 freeze into a controller state that answers nothing at all. Rather than argue with it, the memory is addressed directly.
Inside is whichever silicon was cheapest that quarter, and the printed logo tells you nothing about it. Whatever controller turns up decides the route, which is why the diagnostic comes first.
A stick that flexed and returned to shape tends to be hiding hairline cracks in its tracks. Repaired under magnification, then read end to end.
The SDCZ430 is designed to live permanently in a port, and a hot laptop socket is a poor place to spend three years. The controller gives up and monolith probing takes over.
The SDCZ73's metal jacket comes away and takes a few tracks with it as a keepsake. Board rework on the flash bench, then a full image.
Verbatim's office staple gets used as a working drive rather than a transfer drive, which is several years of writes it was never specified for. The failure is gradual until it is sudden.
The long-bodied DTX levers itself against tight front sockets until the joints fracture. A reflow under magnification usually restores order without going any further.
The retractable Courier picks up grit in its slider and the Neon simply gets old. Both fail at the controller far more often than at the memory, which is the good news.
Pocket humidity and years of thumbs oxidise the contacts until the stick flickers in and out at random. Dressed properly, then one continuous image rather than a dozen attempts.
A storm or a failing power supply pushes a surge out through the tower's front sockets and the resident stick takes it. Controller cremated, memory usually untouched.
Flash in storage leaks its charge away, and old archives read back faint. Careful imaging with ECC given time keeps a great deal that a confident quick read would have discarded as unreadable.
Windows offered to fix the drive and produced a folder of numbered fragments with no names. We ignore the fragments entirely and rebuild the genuine layout out of a raw image.
Too many wrong PINs and they wipe themselves by design, and no lab talks them out of it. With the PIN in hand the job becomes ordinary, which is worth knowing before you start guessing.
Bend a stick hard enough and the silicon inside can crack even when the board looks straight and the solder is fine. Nothing enumerates and nothing ever will, because the part doing the enumerating is in pieces. Chip-off and a software rebuild of the mapping is the route, and it works.
Sticks used to run a live operating system, or to carry a bootable installer that gets rewritten every few months, take a workload no promotional flash drive was designed for. The wear-levelling gives out first, then whole blocks stop answering. Everything written earlier is usually still reachable.
A controller that hits an error during a write can flip itself into a protected state and stay there for good. Every utility reports the disk as write-protected and no amount of registry advice from a forum will change it, because the flag is in the controller's own tables rather than in Windows.
Owners find the manufacturer's low-level format utility online and run it to cure a fault. It rebuilds the controller's tables from scratch and, in doing so, discards the map that says where everything was. What remains is recoverable only by reading the raw memory and reconstructing the arrangement, which is exactly what this bench does.
The stick threw an error, the format offer looked like the practical answer, and it was accepted. A quick format is survivable and a full one much less so. Either way, stop there — every file written to the stick afterwards lands on top of what we would otherwise be recovering.
Whatever your office calls them — memory sticks, pen drives, thumb drives — the weak point is always that one joint where the metal connector meets the little board inside. A knee against a laptop on the train does it. Under magnification, torn pads get rebuilt and cracked tracks bridged, and when the board is past that stage the memory comes off and goes onto a programmer instead, which means nothing on the stick's own board has to function again. The commonest patients are simply whatever people buy: SanDisk Cruzer Blade and Ultra Fit, Kingston DataTraveler DT100 G3 and the little metal DTSE9, Samsung BAR Plus, Verbatim Store 'n' Go, Integral and PNY. Inside them sits a short list of controllers — Phison, Silicon Motion, Alcor, Chipsbank — and identifying which one is present decides how the raw dump gets decoded afterwards.
Wrong folder deleted, or every document replaced by a shortcut icon after a trip to a print shop? The second of those is a nuisance rather than a catastrophe, since that sort of infection conceals far more than it destroys, and deletion marks space as available without scrubbing a thing. Which makes the instruction short and mildly boring: drawer, unplugged, hands off. Here a full copy is taken end to end and your documents are carved out of that copy rather than out of the original. Sticks that died quietly with no drama attached follow the same road, straight through the chips. Newer monolithic designs, where controller and memory are sealed into a single part, want test points rather than a soldering iron — slower, and something the assessment will have spotted before you are asked to decide anything.
Stick work is chip work at every stage, so it lives on the flash bench from booking in to going home:
Reads the memory chips directly and rebuilds in software the arithmetic the dead controller used to do. When a stick or card answers nothing at all, this is where the conversation starts again.
Hot-air and infrared profiles set so a memory package leaves a ruined board while the charge stored in it stays where it is. The whole skill is temperature discipline and patience.
Some cards have no separate chip to lift. Test points are identified against our pinout records and wired out by hand under magnification: slow work, and the only work that gets those cards read.
The XOR, ECC and wear-levelling puzzle worked through until a raw dump reads back as named folders. Unglamorous arithmetic with a good ending.
Lifted pads, torn tracks and sheared plugs are all rebuilt under magnification. A fair share of sticks written off as dead need this and nothing more.
Every stick and card is read behind a blocked interface, so the original memory goes home in exactly the state it arrived in.
Between the Cruzer Blade, the Ultra Flair, the Exodia and the Attaché sits a startling amount of Norfolk's payroll, parish minutes, dissertations and quotations, most of it copied nowhere else. Each one fails true to type. SanDisk's slim metal bodies run hot and lose their casings, the SDCZ50 snaps at the neck or drops to zero, Kingston's long budget sticks crack their joints against tight ports, and the Store 'n' Go gets used as a working drive until the wear-levelling runs out of ideas. The Integral Courier and Neon that fill office drawers keep going until their controllers do not. Conference freebies are a lottery we would spare you if we could, and the only sensible advice about them is not to keep the only copy of anything on one. Everything on this page is read at chip level, and the diagnostic that decides which method applies costs nothing and takes two working days from arrival.
Most of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, most work under no fix no fee. Start online, or ring us.