A piano teacher in Richmond noticed something odd a fortnight before the stick died: file dates that were not the dates she had saved things on, and a couple of names with characters in them she had certainly not typed. She carried on using it. Then no machine in the house would acknowledge it at all. On it were recital recordings of pupils who have since left.
| Media | A USB flash drive that first showed corrupted file details and altered dates, then stopped being recognised by any computer at all. It holds recital recordings with no other copy. |
| What was reported | USB stick, file details and dates showing wrongly at first, then no longer recognised on any PC, recital recordings of former pupils wanted back. |
| Fault class | Electronic. The stick's controller failed progressively: first mistranslating where things were, which is what produced the wrong dates and mangled names, then failing outright, at which point the stick could no longer introduce itself. The memory itself was intact. |
| On the bench | Attempted behind a hardware write blocker to confirm the controller was not answering, opened and examined under a stereo microscope, the NAND package desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer, the controller's translation reconstructed from the raw dump, the volume parsed in R-Studio, recordings carved by content signature and validated by playing them before being written to fresh media. |
Wrong dates on the right files is a translation error. Flash memory is not addressed directly. A controller keeps a map between the addresses a computer asks for and the physical pages that actually hold the data, and it rewrites that map constantly. When the controller starts making mistakes, the first symptom is usually metadata arriving from the wrong place: dates, names and sizes that belong to something else.
The fortnight of odd behaviour was the warning. Controllers rarely fail cleanly. They degrade, and during the degradation the stick still works well enough to look usable. Continuing to write to it during that period is the worst thing that can be done, because every write is recorded in a map that is already unreliable.
When it stops being recognised, the map is the casualty, not the memory. The memory chip is a separate component and it does not fail because the controller did. It is still holding the pages. What has gone is the only thing that knew how those pages fitted together.
Reading past a dead controller means going to the chip. The memory is lifted off the board and read directly on a programmer, which produces a raw dump with no order to it. The order has to be worked out from the dump itself: the interleaving, the page layout, the correction and scrambling the controller applied. That reconstruction is the job, and it is why chip-level work sits outside the no fix, no fee guarantee.
One attempt behind a hardware write blocker confirmed the controller was not answering at all, which meant nothing could be read through it however patient the software. The stick was opened and the board examined under the microscope, where the memory package was intact and unmarked.
The NAND was desoldered under hot air and read on a specialist programmer, giving a raw dump in the physical order the chip stores things rather than the logical order the computer used to see. The interleaving and page structure were worked out from the dump, the scrambling reversed, and a coherent volume assembled. R-Studio read what remained of the directory, and the recordings whose references had gone were carved by content signature and played through before anything was written to fresh media.
All of the recital recordings came back, along with a folder of scanned sheet music she had assumed was lost with them. The stick did not go home working, because it cannot: the memory now lives on a bench, not in a case.
A card or a USB stick is £250 + VAT. Chip-level work is named in the published exclusion, so this was not a job the guarantee covered: half the figure was taken before the memory came off the board and the balance once the recordings had been checked.
Treat strange metadata as a countdown. Dates that are not yours, names with characters you did not type, sizes that make no sense: all of those mean the controller has begun mistranslating, and it will not get better. Copy everything off immediately, in one pass, and stop using the stick even if it appears to recover. Do not reformat it, because a format writes a new structure through a map that is already wrong. If it has already stopped being recognised, no software will help, because there is nothing left to talk to. The memory chip is almost certainly fine, and reaching it is bench work.
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
A cracked card can still be recovered, provided the break missed the memory die itself
A snapped-off connector stops a stick plugging in, and says nothing about the memory behind it
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.