A Warwick finalist living in Leamington Spa dropped her USB stick down the side of a desk and stood on it retrieving it. The plastic split beside the metal shell. For a fortnight afterwards it kept working, more or less, which is why she carried on using it. Then Windows began offering to format the drive every time it went in, and between those prompts it reported an invalid directory name. Her project write-up and eight weeks of data were on it and the submission was inside a fortnight, so she stopped and asked rather than accepting the format.
| Media | A USB stick with a split casing beside the connector that prompts Windows to format it and reports an invalid directory name. It carries a final-year project write-up and the data behind it. |
| What was reported | USB stick, cracked next to the connector after being stood on, still worked intermittently for two weeks, now prompts for a format on every insertion, reports an invalid directory name, a project submission due. |
| Fault class | A physical break at the connector with filesystem damage on top of it. The crack let the board flex against the shell, so contact came and went during use, and writes that were interrupted part way through left the index inconsistent. The memory itself had not been harmed by any of it. |
| On the bench | Examined under a stereo microscope, where the fracture line was traced across two data-line pads and a supply trace. Rather than repairing a drive nobody would trust again, the memory was desoldered under hot air and read on a specialist programmer, and the controller's mapping was rebuilt from those dumps. The volume was reassembled in R-Studio, the write-up and its data carved where directory entries no longer pointed anywhere, everything opened, and the result written to fresh media. |
The format prompt is Windows failing to make sense of the index, not a diagnosis. When a volume is mounted the operating system reads a small set of structures at the front that describe where everything is. If those disagree with each other, Windows has nothing sensible to offer except to start again, so it proposes a format. Accepting it writes a fresh empty index over the damaged one, which is the single most destructive click available on that dialog box.
The invalid directory message points at the same damage from another angle. That error appears when a folder record contains a name field the filesystem cannot parse, which is exactly what a half-completed write leaves behind. It is a symptom of interrupted bookkeeping rather than of a corrupted document, and the files themselves are generally untouched underneath it.
Two weeks of intermittent use is what turned one fault into two. Every time the contact dropped mid-write, the index went a little further out of step with the memory. Had she stopped when the casing split, this would have been a straightforward read through the board. Carrying on until the prompts started is completely understandable and it is also why the filesystem needed rebuilding rather than simply copying.
Reading the memory off the board sidesteps the flexing entirely. There is no way to make a cracked stick reliable, and a repair that reads correctly on the bench can fail again on the third insertion. Taking the memory off and reading it directly gives a stable copy that no amount of movement can disturb, and everything after that is done on the copy rather than on the patient.
Under magnification the crack ran from the edge of the shell across two pads and into a supply trace, which explains both the intermittent behaviour and why it had grown worse. The board was not powered again once that was established, because a supply trace that is nearly open is a short waiting to happen.
The memory came off under hot air and read on a specialist programmer across several passes that agreed with one another. Reconstructing the controller's arrangement was the bulk of the work, as it always is: the page interleave, the block ordering and the error correction all had to be resolved before a filesystem appeared. R-Studio then rebuilt the volume from the reassembled image, following each surviving record and carving by content signature only where a record had been damaged past use. Every document was opened before release.
The write-up came back with its revision history intact and so did the eight weeks of readings behind it. A dozen small files whose records had been destroyed were recovered by content and returned in a separate folder with a note explaining why they might be truncated, which is a more useful thing to hand a student than a headline figure.
Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT. Lifting the memory is chip-level work and sits on the physical side of the published terms, so 50% was settled upfront and the balance once she had checked the submission opened.
Say no to the format and then stop using it. That dialog is not a repair offer, it is an offer to start again with an empty index, and the index is the only thing standing between you and your documents. The same goes for the check-and-repair tool Windows suggests next: on a stick with a broken contact it will write its changes through an unreliable connection and can make a rebuild considerably harder. If the casing is split, do not tape it up and carry on, and do not press the shell straight, because the fracture is usually across the board rather than the plastic. Get whatever still reads off it in one go if it will mount at all, and if it will not, send it as it is. Do not send it loose in an envelope, and if any part has broken away from the body, put that in the box too.
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 card 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.
A connector that never fitted properly has been working its solder joints loose the whole time
A camera asking to format a card is a camera admitting it cannot read the index, nothing more
The aim is not a working stick at the end of it, and saying so changes what the job looks like
A cracked stick asking to be formatted? Ring 0800 689 0668 and refuse the prompt. Sticks are £250 + VAT and the diagnostic is free.