A landscape gardener in Solihull had a SanDisk USB stick fail with his quotations, site photographs and planting plans on it. He took it to somebody advertising data recovery who told him parts would need changing, kept it for a fortnight and handed it back no better. The question he arrived with was a fair one: does this laboratory replace SanDisk parts, and if not, what exactly is being offered instead. The honest answer changed how he thought about the job.
| Media | A SanDisk USB stick that has failed and was returned unrecovered by an earlier attempt, where the owner was told that parts would need replacing. It holds a landscape gardener's quotations, site photographs and planting plans. |
| What was reported | SanDisk USB stick, failed, taken to an earlier service who said parts needed changing and returned it unrecovered after a fortnight, the owner asking whether parts are replaced here, quotations and site photographs wanted. |
| Fault class | A controller or board failure, with the memory unaffected. Nothing was presented to a host, which places the fault in the parts that manage and connect the memory rather than in the memory itself. The route to the data is therefore past those parts rather than through repaired versions of them. |
| On the bench | Assessed under a stereo microscope with the controller, the memory package and the joints all examined before anything was powered. No component was replaced. The memory was desoldered under hot air and read on a specialist programmer, and the translation the original controller had used was reconstructed from the raw pages afterwards. The quotations and photographs were assembled, opened and written to fresh media. |
Nothing is replaced here, and that is the point rather than a limitation. Swapping a controller between flash drives almost never works, because the arrangement it uses is not standard and is partly built at the factory for that individual device. A replacement arrives knowing a different scheme and reads the memory as nonsense. Advertising a parts swap as the method is a promise built on the least reliable step available.
The aim is the files, and the drive is expendable. Once that is agreed the job simplifies enormously. The memory comes off the board and is read directly, which skips the connector, the board traces and the controller in one step. There is no attempt to make the stick work again and no reason to want one, since a drive that has already failed will not be trusted with a quotation again.
A fortnight with somebody else was not wasted, though it felt like it. Nothing had been done to the memory: the joints were untouched, there was no heat marking and the board had not been reworked. It is worth checking that, because a previous attempt with a soldering iron and no magnification can leave a memory package damaged, and then the honest answer is a worse one.
Reading flash is a reconstruction problem, not a copying problem. What a programmer returns is raw pages in physical order, interleaved across the dies in whatever pattern the controller chose, with error correction still applied. Turning that into a volume means working out the interleave, the block ordering and the correction scheme. That work is what is actually being bought, and it is why the price does not depend on the make of the drive.
The casing came off under magnification. The board was clean, with no cracked joints, no corrosion and no sign that anyone had put an iron near it, which meant the previous fortnight had at least done no harm. On a controlled reader the drive drew current and never enumerated, confirming the controller as the failure and closing off any route through the front of the device.
The memory was lifted under hot air and read on a specialist programmer across repeated passes that agreed with one another. Reconstruction was the substantial part of the day: the interleave across the dies, the block ordering and the error correction all had to be resolved before a directory appeared. Once the volume assembled, quotations and site photographs from across three years were opened before anything was written to fresh media.
The quotations, the planting plans and around eleven thousand site photographs came back, including the before-and-after sets he uses to win work. He was advised to keep those somewhere that is not a single stick in a van, and the drive itself was not returned because there was nothing left of it to return.
A USB stick is £250 + VAT. Taking the memory off is chip-level work and sits within the published exclusion, so half the figure was payable before the bench started and 50% on completion once he had the files.
Ask what will actually be done, because parts replacement means very different things on different media. On a hard disk a donor board or a donor head assembly is genuine and well established practice. On a USB stick or a memory card it is close to meaningless, since the controller's arrangement is specific to that device and a replacement cannot interpret the memory it inherits. If the answer involves swapping a controller and hoping, be careful. Ask instead whether the memory will be read directly and the data reconstructed from it, which is the method that works, and accept that the drive will not come back usable afterwards. Before handing a stick to anybody, ask whether they will open it and whether anyone will put an iron to the board, because a poorly executed rework can damage the one component that still holds your files.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at £250 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. This file sits in the half the guarantee does not reach. Four sorts of work are excluded from no fix, no fee and there are no others: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. On any of them half the quoted figure is settled before the bench starts, with the remainder due when the files go back. Everything outside those four — a deletion, a formatted card, a broken file system, a lost partition, and firmware or service-area repair, which counts as logical however it sounds — runs under no fix, no fee, so an attempt that fails costs nothing.
If yours is doing the same thing. This drive was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
Scoring removes the magnetic layer, so the honest question is how much of the surface it missed
A replacement board without the original ROM is a stranger's brain in the wrong body
A quoted chance of fifty-fifty is an honest way of saying the answer is in the geometry
Been quoted for parts on a failed stick? Ring 0800 689 0668. Sticks are £250 + VAT and the assessment costs nothing.