Devices · USB sticks and flash drives
Cards and sticks cost £250 + VAT, and the free look comes first. Almost nothing we receive was ever meant to be relied on: a year's worth of invoices stored nowhere else, or a single afternoon's copy that quietly became the only one. Plugs snap off. Controllers quit. But the memory nearly always survives both, and that is where the bench begins. A handful arrive every week: stock photographs from a Newark dealer, a postgraduate's thesis chapter from University Park in Nottingham, the quotes a fitter from Hinckley carries from job to job.
Ask an engineer and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| The only message from Windows: Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Nothing whatever. The controller has stopped replying | Stop working through the ports |
| On screen: USB device not recognized | The device never finishes enumerating | Try one more port, then leave it |
| Windows will not open it until you format it | A broken file system, and unbroken files | Say no to the format prompt |
| Mounts but shows 0 bytes, and then: insert a disk into removable disk | The controller no longer sees its own memory | That is chip-level work |
| 0x80070570 on every open: Windows reports the file or directory as corrupted | Broken FAT or exFAT structures | Recoverable, provided nothing more gets written |
| It says: Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller has died outright | That refusal is in your favour |
Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
On an older stick, the memory package can be removed from its board and read on its own. There is nothing to lift on a monolith: one block of resin holds both the memory and the controller, and the way in is a row of test pads spaced fractions of a millimetre apart.
Blocks are moved around the die by wear levelling, and interleaving spreads them across the planes for speed. A raw read returns all of that jumbled together, and it is unpicked in software, layer by layer, until named files with real dates appear.
The files appear as a list before anything else. No invoice is sent until you have accepted that list, and the files then travel to you on new media, with return postage at our expense.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
Plain speaking about the statistics: no consumer flash failure rate worth repeating exists. No one runs USB sticks in fleets; data centres count spinning disks instead, so the figures were never collected. What can honestly be described is what arrives here, and the pattern repeats year on year: nearly all the physical damage is a connector torn from its board, and most of the ones that simply stop are unbranded or free from a trade show.
Seven years of invoices, the CIS records with them, and a return due, all on one stick trodden into a site office floor. The connector had pulled away from the board, and because a monolith gives you nothing to plug into, the controller's pinout was worked out and the data read directly from the test pads. The return was filed on time.
Rarely. The metal shell contains contacts and nothing else; your files sit in the memory package just behind it. A stick broken in half will generally still read. The test is whether the memory package and the resin around it survived the break.
No. It is the controller that stopped answering, not the memory under it. Reach the memory directly and the controller's opinion stops mattering.
Weak NAND run by a weak controller. Some also misstate their capacity: a small die packaged as a larger one, fine until you pass what is physically there. Good for moving a film from one machine to another; not good as anyone's only copy.
One: a memory die cracked right through. Stopped controllers, boards in three pieces, mapping tables that make no sense: just another typical week.
The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.