The treasurer of a scout group in Easthampstead is practical, and when the 16GB stick holding the accounts stopped working he prised the case apart on the kitchen table to have a look. There was a small black component near the plug end that had clearly cooked. His question when he wrote in was a good one: can you read the memory chip and forget the rest of it. Yes, and that is exactly what happened.
| Media | A 16GB USB flash drive that stopped working, opened by its owner, with a visibly failed component on the board near the connector. It holds several years of accounts and gift aid records. |
| What was reported | 16GB USB stick, stopped working, owner opened the case and found a damaged component, asked whether the memory chip could be read directly, wants the accounts back and does not want the stick returned. |
| Fault class | Electronic, on the board. A power-handling component had failed, taking the stick's ability to enumerate with it. The NAND package was untouched and the accounts were still held in it. |
| On the bench | The exposed board examined under a stereo microscope with the failed component and the memory package assessed separately, the NAND desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer past the damaged board and its controller, the controller's translation reconstructed from the raw dump, the volume parsed in R-Studio, spreadsheets and scanned receipts validated by opening them and written to fresh media. |
Opening it did no harm, which is unusual enough to say out loud. A USB stick is not a sealed environment. There are no platters to contaminate and no alignment to disturb, so prising the case apart costs nothing but the case. The same is emphatically not true of a hard drive, where opening one outside clean air is how a recoverable job becomes a difficult one.
What he found was the cause, not the casualty. The component that failed sits between the port and everything else. When it goes, the stick cannot power its controller, so it cannot enumerate, so the computer sees nothing. None of that reaches the memory, which is a separate package a few millimetres away.
Repairing the board was possible and was not worth it. Replacing the failed part might have brought the stick back, and it might equally have revealed a controller damaged by the same event. Reading the memory directly answers the question in one step and does not depend on the rest of the board ever working again.
A raw dump is not files, and that gap is the work. The programmer returns pages in the order the chip stores them, which bears no resemblance to the order the computer saw. Interleaving, page structure, error correction and scrambling all have to be undone before a filesystem appears, and that reconstruction is why chip-level jobs are priced and guaranteed differently.
The board arrived already open, which saved a step. Under the microscope the failed component was obvious and the surrounding traces were intact; the memory package showed no discolouration and no cracked joints, so it was a straightforward candidate for a direct read.
The NAND was desoldered under hot air and read on a specialist programmer. The dump was descrambled and its physical layout reconstructed until a coherent volume appeared, at which point R-Studio read the directory out of it. The accounts spreadsheets and the scanned receipts behind them were opened and checked before anything was written to fresh media.
Five years of accounts, the gift aid records and a set of scanned receipts came back complete. The stick itself was not returned, at his request, since after a chip-off there is nothing left to return.
Sticks and cards are £250 + VAT. Chip-level work is named in the published exclusion and so does not carry the guarantee: half the figure was settled before the memory came off, the balance once he had opened the spreadsheets himself.
Say so, and send the pieces, including the case. Nobody minds that a stick has been opened, and a description of what you saw is genuinely useful: scorching near the plug points at power handling, a chip with a lifted corner points somewhere else. Do not try to reflow anything with a soldering iron or a hot air gun from a toolbox, because too much heat in the wrong place can damage the memory package, which is the one part that still matters. Do not put the stick back into a machine to check either. If it failed electrically, powering it again risks whatever is left. The memory is almost always readable; the board it was sitting on rarely needs to be.
These files are written up from genuine enquiries taken from households and businesses in Bracknell, across Berkshire and Surrey and into London, with names, firms and anything else identifying stripped out. Each one sets down how the fault was reasoned through, the method it actually needed and the equipment it was worked on. One of them is a job that was turned away, which belongs here as much as the rest of them.
A format prompt is the machine admitting it cannot read the index, not an instruction to obey
Corrupted details followed by no recognition at all is a controller failing in two stages
A cracked card can still be recovered, provided the break missed the memory die itself
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.