Flash and SSD · worn NAND · NTG-2025-2068
It Would Not Save in Spring; by Summer It Would Not Open.
Tenancy schedules, valuation photographs of machinery and stock, and the notes she types up in the car after every farm visit — a Grantham land agent had all of it on one stick, and nowhere else. It failed in stages. In the spring, the laptop she takes out to appointments would not put anything new onto it
. By summer, folders would no longer open either. The one thing it manages now is USB device not recognized
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
The order of those two failures is itself the answer. Writing is what wears flash out; reading takes nothing from it. A cell gives up part of its life to each program-and-erase cycle; fetching a page back costs it nothing at all — so a stick that would not save in the spring and would not open by the summer has simply been used up. The first half of that is concealed by the controller. While spares last, tired blocks are quietly retired, and the translation tables are kept on whatever silicon is still dependable. Once the spares run out those tables have nowhere left to live, and the stick goes quiet on the bus. What appears on screen is a controller with no answers left in it, and that tells you nothing whatever about the photographs.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Flash | Matched the NAND against our library, lifted it clear of the board and read the die itself | Reads the flash at chip level, bypassing the controller, matched to a maker-ID library we keep current |
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Removed the XOR mask, then returned the pages to the order the controller had used | A raw NAND dump put back together: ECC, XOR mask, page order, then files |
| R-Studio Technician | Put the FAT volume back together, which brought her own naming with it | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Which had gone first, the flash or the controller
USB produced nothing at all. The casing came off and probes went on the board. Addressed on its own, the memory replied immediately, and we already held its part number in the library. Alongside it the controller stayed silent — which is exactly what the sequence of symptoms, saving before reading, had pointed to from the start.
Pull the pages first, sort the order out afterwards
What comes off a chip is nothing like a disk image. Error-correction bytes are still attached, an XOR mask of the controller's own devising covers everything, and page order is whatever some translation layer, now gone, once decided. Three operations have to succeed: the errors corrected, the mask taken off, the order rebuilt. All three and files appear. One of them wrong and what you have is noise.
Rebuild the volume, then open every item
With the errors corrected and the order rebuilt, the FAT tables came out cleanly, and up came the archive under her own naming. Then every item was opened by hand: the schedules, the valuation photographs, the typed-up notes. Counting files proves very little. Anything that will not open has not come back at all.
What was returned.
The whole archive went home on fresh media. She keeps three copies now, and one of them never leaves the office. In a drawer somewhere is the worn stick, kept as a reminder of which failure arrived first.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More jobs from the flash and SSD bench.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.