Devices · flash drives & USB sticks
Nobody means to rely on a flash drive for anything important, but it ends up holding it anyway: a year of invoices kept nowhere else, or a temporary copy that became the only one. Connectors snap. Controllers die. Either way the memory is generally fine, and that is where we start. A few arrive from Plymouth each week.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
| What turns up | What that points to | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| Device Manager identifies it as Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | No reaction whatsoever. The controller has died | Stop working through ports |
| USB device not recognized | Enumeration never finishes | One more port, then leave it |
| A prompt to format the disk before use | The filesystem is broken; the files are not | Decline the offer to format it |
| 0 bytes, and the prompt: Please insert a disk into removable disk | The controller can no longer see its memory | Chip-level work needed |
| 0x80070570 when opening: file or directory corrupted and unreadable | The FAT or exFAT structures took damage | Recoverable, so long as nothing more is written |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller has stopped for good | That refusal is in your interest |
Whatever is delivered is booked in using a unique reference (case number) on the date it arrives at the bench. The engineer will identify the actual fault at no charge. This gives a straightforward answer on what can be recovered from the drive and what cannot, plus one written quotation. There will be no further activity until you have read and accepted the quotation.
On an older drive the memory package comes off the board and is read on its own. This won't work with a monolith, because the memory and the controller are cast into a single unit. The way in is a row of tiny test pads, none wider than a fraction of a millimetre.
Wear levelling moves blocks around the die. Interleaving spreads them across planes for speed. A raw read holds both of these mixed together, so it is taken apart in software one layer at a time until named files with proper dates appear again.
The file list reaches you first. Nothing is billed before you accept it, and everything comes back on new media.
Give yourself time to consider it. It costs you nothing. We list all of the files we recover for you before sending out an invoice, and we only ask for payment once you have authorised it. We also buy media specifically for your recovery and send it back to you, with the return postage paid by us. The case stays here on our bench until we have your confirmation that the files open properly on your own machine.
Straight talk about the numbers: nobody has published a reliable failure rate for consumer flash. These drives are not run in fleets, and no data centre tracks them the way it tracks its disks, so the evidence was never gathered. What we see on the bench is a narrow sample, and the results repeat each year: most physical damage is a broken connector, and drives that stop dead without warning are mostly unbranded, or were given away free at a trade show.
Someone stepped on it in a site office and the connector broke away from the board. Seven years of invoices were on that stick, with the CIS records beside them, and a tax return was due. A monolith has no socket to work through, so the controller's pinout was traced and the read taken off the test pads. The return was filed on the day.
Rarely. All that shell does is carry the contacts; the files sit in the memory package behind them. A drive that has come apart in two will usually still read, as long as the package and the moulding around it aren't cracked.
No. The controller stopped responding; the memory underneath it never did. Read that memory directly and what the controller thinks no longer matters.
Bad memory, with a bad controller managing it. Some also claim to be larger than they really are: a small die reporting itself as a large one, working fine until you fill it past the point where the real memory runs out. Fine for moving a film from one machine to another. Never fine enough to be your only copy.
Only one case: a memory die split right down the middle. Broken controllers, boards broken into pieces, mapping tables in a mess: those make up a typical week.
Diagnosis costs nothing. We give you a report listing which files can be read, which cannot, and what is needed to get them off. Do not connect the drive until then.