A small letting agency in Kenilworth keeps its inventories, deposit schedules and check-out photographs on a memory stick that goes between the office and whoever is out doing viewings. It stopped being seen as a storage device on any machine in the building, and then on the owner's own laptop at home, and then on a computer at her accountant's. Nothing appeared, nothing was offered and no message was shown. She wanted everything off it, and she wanted to know whether there was any point sending it at all.
| Media | A USB memory stick that no computer will recognise as a storage device. It produces no entry and no message on any machine tried. It carries a letting agency's inventories, deposit schedules and photographs. |
| What was reported | Memory stick, no longer recognised as storage on any computer, tried on four machines in three locations, no entry and no error message anywhere, all files wanted, tenancy paperwork and check-out photographs on it. |
| Fault class | Controller failure. The small processor that manages the memory and presents it to a computer had stopped working, so nothing was offered to any host and no message could be generated. The memory it manages was undamaged, which is the ordinary situation when a controller dies, and remains readable by other means. |
| On the bench | Assessed under a stereo microscope with the controller and the memory package both examined for physical damage before anything was powered. The controller proved unresponsive on a controlled reader, so the memory was desoldered under hot air and read on a specialist programmer. The translation the dead controller had used between logical addresses and physical pages was reconstructed from the raw dumps, and the records were assembled, opened and written to fresh media. |
Silence on every machine is a stronger clue than an error message. An error means the computer had a conversation that went badly. Nothing at all means the conversation never started, and since a stick that gets power will normally announce itself within a second, the part responsible for announcing has failed. That narrows the fault to one component before anything is taken apart.
The memory and the controller are separate parts and fail separately. A flash drive is a small board carrying a memory package, a controller and a connector. The memory holds the data; the controller decides where each byte lives, spreads writes to even out wear and hides failed cells. When it dies the arrangement it was using is lost with it, but the contents are exactly where it left them.
No software can reach past a dead controller, whatever it claims. Recovery tools run on the computer and talk to the drive through the controller. If the controller is not answering there is nothing for them to talk to, which is why downloading another one is a waste of an evening. This is the point at which people are most likely to be sold something that cannot work.
Reconstructing the arrangement is the actual work. Reading the memory takes an hour. Working out how a particular controller interleaved pages across the dies, ordered the blocks and applied its error correction takes considerably longer, and until that is right the dump is a heap of fragments. What comes back at the end is a volume, and the stick that used to carry it does not survive the process.
Under magnification the board was undamaged: no cracked joints, no heat marking, no corrosion. On a controlled reader the drive drew a small current and never enumerated, which confirmed the controller as the failed part rather than the connector or the memory, and meant there was no route to the data through the front of the device.
The memory came off under hot air and read on a specialist programmer, several passes agreeing with one another. The reconstruction took most of the day: establishing the interleave, resolving the block order and applying the error correction before anything resembling a directory would appear. When the volume assembled it was almost complete, and a sample of inventories and photographs was opened before the set was written to fresh media.
The inventories, the deposit schedules and the check-out photographs all came back, including a set covering a deposit dispute that was already with an adjudicator. Two documents written on the last day of use were incomplete, which is what a controller failing mid-write produces, and both were reconstructable from the office diary.
A memory stick is £250 + VAT. Lifting the memory is chip-level work and named in the published exclusion, so 50% of the quote was settled before the bench started and the balance once the paperwork had been checked.
Stop trying more machines once you have tried two or three, because the answer does not change and each attempt is another power cycle through a board that has already failed. Do not install recovery software, since nothing running on a computer can reach a device that is not communicating with it, and treat any product that claims otherwise with suspicion. Do not open the casing to look, and above all do not let anyone reflow the joints with a soldering iron and no magnification, because a bridged connection can take the memory with it and the memory is the only thing of value left. If the stick carries business records, be realistic about whether one small device in a handbag was ever the right place for them. Send it in a small rigid box, and if the drive has a partner that was used the same way, say so, because sticks bought in a pair tend to fail within months of each other.
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
An intermittent contact writes half a change and leaves the index describing something that is no longer there
A camera asking to format a card is a camera admitting it cannot read the index, nothing more
A stick no machine will recognise? Ring 0800 689 0668. Sticks are £250 + VAT and finding out what is reachable costs nothing.