The office of a minicab firm in Hounslow ran its rotas, licensing paperwork and insurance certificates off a stick that lived permanently in the front of the machine. It had been getting warm for weeks. One evening the metal shell came away as it was pulled out, taking one side of the plastic body with it, and what was left would not go into any port.
| Media | A USB flash drive that had been running hot for some weeks and whose connector end came apart, the shell and one side of the body separating from the board. It no longer plugs in. |
| What was reported | USB stick, getting hot in use, connector end came apart with the sides coming off, will not connect to a computer, driver rotas and licensing paperwork on it, recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Physical, at the connector, with heat as the background cause. Running warm for weeks had softened the adhesive and stressed the joints until the plug assembly separated from the board. The memory package was undamaged and could be read directly. |
| On the bench | The remains opened and examined under a stereo microscope with the memory package and the board checked for heat damage, the NAND desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer past the broken connector and its controller, the translation reconstructed from the dump, the volume parsed in R-Studio, documents carved by content where references were gone, validated and written to fresh media. |
A stick that lives in a port takes a lot of leverage. Every time something brushes past it the joint at the connector takes the load, and a stick left permanently in a front-panel socket takes that load hundreds of times a week. The failure is gradual and then sudden, which is what she described.
Running warm was the other half of the story. Cheap controllers get hot when they are working, and a stick that is warm all the time is a stick working harder than it should, usually because it is nearly full or because its controller is spending time correcting errors. Heat softens the adhesive holding the plug body and accelerates exactly the mechanical failure that followed.
Soldering a new connector on is rarely the answer. It can be, on a stick whose pads survived. Where the connector has torn away it usually takes pads with it, and reconstructing those to the point where a controller can be trusted to present the memory correctly is more work, and more risk, than reading the memory directly.
The memory is a separate component and it does not care. Nothing that happened at the plug end reached the NAND package. Reading it means lifting it off, dumping it, and rebuilding the logical order the controller used to apply, which is the standard route for any stick whose front end has failed.
What was left of the stick was opened and examined under the microscope. The plug had torn three pads off the board on its way out, and there was visible discolouration around the controller consistent with the heat she had described. The memory package showed nothing at all, which is the usual finding.
The NAND was desoldered under hot air and read on a specialist programmer, bypassing both the ruined connector and the controller behind it. The dump was descrambled, the page layout and interleaving reconstructed, and a coherent volume assembled. R-Studio recovered most of the directory, and the documents whose entries had gone were carved by content signature. Everything was opened and checked before being written to fresh media.
The rotas, the licensing paperwork and the insurance certificates all came back, including a scanned folder the office manager had thought was only on the stick and turned out to be only on the stick. It now lives on the office machine with a copy elsewhere.
A card or a stick is £250 + VAT. Chip-level work sits outside the published guarantee, so half the figure was taken before the memory came off the board, with the balance falling due once the recovered documents had been checked.
Send the pieces, all of them, and do not attempt to reattach anything. Superglue around a connector wicks into places it cannot be got out of and can make a straightforward chip read considerably harder. A stick that runs warm in normal use is worth copying off and retiring, because heat is a symptom of a controller working hard and it is also what loosens the plug assembly. Do not leave a stick permanently plugged into a front socket where it can be knocked, and do not treat one as the only copy of anything a business depends on. Once the connector has gone, no amount of software will help, because there is nothing to plug in.
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.