Flash & SSD · case notes · NTG-2025-2089
Five Machines, a Powered Hub, and Not a Flicker.
One pond it worked at; the next it did not. Every machine in the office got a turn — two desktops, three laptops, and then a powered hub bought specially for the purpose — and an ecological consultancy in Leicester got the same answer from all six: not so much as a flicker from a single one of them
. No chime, and nothing in Disk Management. You may as well be pushing a pebble into the port
, was how the surveyor put it. A whole season of newt survey photographs was on that stick, with a licence deadline behind them.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
Once six hosts in a row have said nothing, the computers are out of the enquiry and the fault is inside the plastic, where the candidates number two. There is the metal connector, soldered onto pads that flex slightly each time the stick goes into a port. There is the controller, which exists to talk to a host on behalf of the memory. A photograph is held by neither of them; both simply sit between you and the memory, and memory holds what was written to it long after everything around it has given out. From there it is bench work, and cards and sticks carry a published band of £250 + VAT.
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 | The memory package read on its own, the controller taken out of the path | Reads the flash at chip level, bypassing the controller, matched to a maker-ID library we keep current |
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Dump converted back to a logical image — correction codes, XOR, then page and block order | A raw NAND dump put back together: ECC, XOR mask, page order, then files |
| BGA rework station & IR preheat | BGA off in one piece, pads dressed so it would seat in the socket adapter | Hot enough to lift the chip and reball its pads, never hot enough to damage what is stored on it |
What happened on the bench.
Rule out the hour-long repair first
Everything began at the stereo microscope. A split in the solder beneath the connector is a job for an iron and roughly an hour, after which the stick reads again — but nothing of that sort was there. The joints were whole and the tracks continuous. Under bench power the controller drew what it should have drawn and said nothing at all on its data lines, which is exactly what six machines had experienced.
Work on the memory; leave the controller behind
The package came away, its pads were cleaned, and a socket adapter held it for a raw read. One fact makes that possible: a failing controller takes nothing away with it. Whatever was written remains in the silicon, ordered however that specific chip had been ordering it.
Get the order right and the folders reappear
The dump then went through Rusolut — correction codes applied, XOR resolved, pages and blocks returned to their old positions — until the arrangement the dead controller had once presented was there again. On top of it a filesystem mounted, survey folders included.
What was returned.
New media carried the photographs home, three frames light, and there was still time before the licence deadline. Those three were shot on the last pond visit and came back damaged; rather than rounding anything into a percentage, the report names them. Everything else from the season is intact.
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.