Flash gives no warning and makes no noise, so nearly everything worth knowing comes from what a stick reports when you plug it in: no capacity, a capacity it never had, a format prompt, or a drive letter with nothing at all behind it. This page reads those claims, explains why three different constructions produce three different sets of odds, and covers encrypted sticks and the repair utilities that quietly throw your files away.
Sticks, pen drives and memory cards are £250 + VAT at any capacity, examined free first. An encrypted stick where the key can be produced is £400 + VAT. Deleted files and format prompts are logical work and carry the guarantee; chip-level work does not, and takes half upfront.
Flash has no moving parts and makes no noise on the way down, so nearly everything worth knowing comes from what the stick reports when it is plugged in. Six claims come up over and over, and each one points somewhere different.
A letter appears and the capacity behind it is nothing at all. The controller has stopped translating, which usually means it has failed outright or the memory behind it has worn past the point of being addressable. Nothing done from a computer alters that, and repair tools aimed at it only add writes. Bench work, and the construction decides how it goes.
Sold as 512GB and holding 16GB, with the firmware instructed to claim the larger number. It behaves impeccably until the writing wraps back over the beginning, at which point the earliest files are destroyed rather than merely unlisted. Where the capacity looked generous for the price, this is very probably what has happened.
The letter exists and, so far as Windows is concerned, the medium behind it does not. That points at the controller rather than the memory, and it is one of the states where reading the flash directly can still produce everything. Trying it in six further machines changes the message not at all and does risk finishing the board.
The filing structure has been damaged, most often because the stick came out during a write. Refuse. The contents are almost always intact and formatting exchanges the damaged structure for an empty one. Eject it, put it where nobody will pick it up absent-mindedly, and have it read rather than repaired where it stands.
No physical switch involved. Some controllers lock themselves read-only on detecting their own decline, and inconvenient though that is, the lock is protecting whatever survives. Defeating it with a utility works squarely against your own interests. Copy off whatever is visible now, while the stick is still willing to offer it.
Something on the board is drawing current it should not, and warmth is the one symptom on this list that gets worse the longer you think about it. Take it out of the socket and leave it out. Temperature damages flash in ways that no laboratory undoes, so the deciding is better done with the stick lying on a desk than sitting in a port.
Every stick contains memory that stores the data, a controller that manages it and translates for the computer, and a board and connector joining the two to the outside world. Which of the three failed decides what the work is, and how the stick was manufactured decides what that work costs and whether it is available at all.
The traditional arrangement solders a separate memory package to a board beside a separate controller. Where the board or the controller has gone, the memory can be reached on its own terms and the contents reconstructed from what comes off it. The second arrangement seals the whole assembly into one moulded part, which is now standard on the very small and very thin designs, and leaves no separate package to reach — so the work becomes chip-level engineering: possible, skilled, slower, and outside the no fix, no fee guarantee. The third arrangement is a stick that is really a card reader with a card fixed inside it, which sounds like a joke and turns up often enough to be worth a sentence.
The examination establishes which of the three is in your hand before any decision is taken, and it is free whatever the answer. The general service page for pen drives, including cracked connectors and the physical breakages behind most of them, is USB memory stick recovery.
A controller does considerably more than pass bytes along. It distributes writes so that no region wears out ahead of the rest, retires cells that have failed, and maintains a private table converting what your computer asked for into where those bytes physically sit. That table explains how a stick with entirely healthy memory becomes completely unreadable the moment its controller stops: every byte is present, and nothing outside the stick knows what order they belong in.
Getting them back therefore means reading the memory directly and rebuilding the conversion from the patterns in what comes off — slow, skilled work rather than anything a desktop program achieves. It is also why these devices fail so abruptly. No noise, no gradual decline, no warning of any kind. The controller either answers or it does not, and the morning it stops is generally the first anybody knew there was anything wrong.
Flash tolerates a limited number of write cycles, and a stick pressed into service as a working drive rather than as a way of carrying files reaches that limit far sooner than its owner expects. The opening symptoms are mild enough to be ignored: slow to appear, slow over a copy that used to be quick, occasionally needing a second push into the socket. Then the capacity goes wrong, and then it stops appearing altogether. Where a stick has begun behaving strangely, copy it off today and retire it, because they very seldom improve on their own.
A stick protected with BitLocker To Go, or a hardware-encrypted model with a keypad along the side, recovers in the ordinary way provided the password, the key or the recovery key can be produced. That places it in the £400 + VAT band covering encrypted media of every kind, rather than adding a surcharge to the flash band. Without the key nobody can help, anywhere, and that is the encryption performing exactly as purchased rather than a shortcoming of a laboratory.
The related trap is the manufacturer utility. Every brand publishes something that promises to bring a stick back into working order, and bringing the stick back and getting your files back are opposing objectives. Those programs rebuild the tables the controller works from and are entirely content to discard the contents while they do it. Where the data is worth more than the hardware, leave them alone.
Sticks, pen drives and memory cards are £250 + VAT at any capacity. One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Recorder disks and encrypted media where the key exists are £400 + VAT. Anything with several disks inside it — a network box, RAID, SAN or a server — begins from £500 + VAT and climbs with the member count. Forensic casework reported in full is £800 + VAT, and the verified image with deletions extracted and no report is £400 + VAT.
Looking is free and closes on the second working day after the stick is logged in, with the figure fixed in writing at that point. Logical faults — deleted files, a quick format, damaged filing — carry no fix, no fee. A snapped connector, a dead controller and chip-level work do not, being physical and electronic faults, and half the quoted figure falls due upfront on that kind of job.
Deleted or formatted on a sound stick used for nothing since: very good indeed. Damaged filing after an unsafe removal: very good. A broken connector or board with a separate memory package behind it: good. A failed controller: reasonable, and entirely dependent on the construction. Worn-out memory, or a fake-capacity stick that has already looped over its own beginning: poor, and you will hear that plainly rather than be encouraged into spending. Whatever the answer, the examination is free, so nobody pays to be told no.
Put it in a small rigid box, or tape it flat to stiff card inside a padded envelope, so it is not the one small hard object in a large parcel absorbing every knock on the way down. Where the connector is broken, leave it broken — send the pieces precisely as they are, including anything that came away, because a bent contact bent back one more time is a contact that snaps off. Add the booking-in form with a name, a number you answer and a line about what happened. Oxford takes drop-offs on weekdays from 9:00am to 5:30pm, fifty-five miles down the M40, though for something this small the post makes rather more sense than the petrol.
And the advice: a stick carries files between places, it does not keep them. Most of the ones arriving here held the only copy of something that mattered — a dissertation from one of the universities, the accounts of a one-room business, photographs somebody was asked to take at a wedding, a club treasurer records handed on at the end of a season. They are small, they get sat on, they go through the wash, they stay in a coat that ends up at a charity shop in Bedworth. Keep the working copy elsewhere and a lost stick becomes an annoyance rather than an emergency.
Temperature is the one thing that damages flash beyond anybody reach, and a stick with a short on it gets warmer for every minute it stays plugged in.
Something rigid, some padding and a tracked label treat an ailing device far better than a week of being carried about in a bag while its owner decides what to do next. Handed in at a Coventry counter during the afternoon, it generally reaches the Oxford bench the following working morning, which beats what most people manage by clearing a day for the M40.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.