Logical & corruption · bench notes · NTG-2025-2082
Every Filename Was There. Every Size Was Zero.
I never waited, I just pulled it
— out of a college laptop, mid-write, and then no more thought given to it that night. Next morning the folder still held everything: portfolio, both assignments, filenames all present. Beside each one sat a size of 0 bytes
, a blank type column, and the word File
. Two would not open. It was his supervisor in the toolroom at Chesterfield who said the useful thing: leave it alone now and get somebody to look at it
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Two things make up a FAT volume and they are kept well apart. One is a short table of records — a name, a type, a size, and the cluster where the file begins. The other is the rest of the chip, where the file itself sits, indifferent to whether that table still says anything sensible. Interrupt an update to the table and a record is left unfinished: size drops to nought, type goes blank, and the file itself lies undisturbed precisely where it was written. Windows recites the table without checking it against anything, which is how a term of work turns into a folder that looks empty. Sticks and cards sit in the published £250 + VAT band, and establishing which fault you actually have is free.
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 | Read the chip sector by sector, believing nothing the filesystem said | Reads the flash at chip level, bypassing the controller, matched to a maker-ID library we keep current |
| R-Studio Technician | Mended the damaged entries against FAT's second copy | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Carved by signature anywhere an entry was past repair | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Nothing happens until there is an image
Power a flash stick and the controller sets about its own business — wear levelling, garbage collection — without the slightest regard for blocks a recovery might want later on. Diagnosis therefore waited. The chip was read off flat onto bench storage first, and only then was anything examined, which meant no step afterwards could take a file off him.
Use whichever copy of the table survived better
FAT holds two allocation tables rather than one, and the interrupted write had not damaged them equally. Wherever the better table agreed with a directory record still intact, the file went back whole — name, size and the full cluster chain. That hands back the original document, not something stitched together afterwards to resemble it.
Whatever was left had to identify itself
Records past repair left their files to declare themselves. Word and PDF signatures were picked out of raw clusters, the bytes following each signature were reassembled in order, and a name went onto a file only where the signature, or the opening lines of readable text, justified one.
What was returned.
The greater part of the portfolio came home under its own filenames. What had been carved arrived with machine-generated ones instead, and an evening was spent putting those right. Everything travelled back on a new stick. One instruction went with it: give the write time to finish before the stick leaves the socket. £250 + VAT is published for a stick, and he had that figure in writing before any work began.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other jobs about missing files and unreadable volumes.
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.