Flash and SSD · job record · RDG-2025-2068
Saving Failed in March, Opening by June.
One stick held everything a Theale family historian had put together for her clients: parish registers photographed page by page, catalogues from old sales, and the memories of the village's older residents, typed up across several winters. The failure arrived in stages. Back in March the laptop she takes to appointments would not accept anything new
. Folders began refusing to open in June. The only thing it produces now is USB device not recognized
.
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What actually caused it.
That order of events is the answer in itself. Flash wears out through writing; reading costs it nothing. A cell gives up a little of its life to every program-and-erase cycle, while fetching a page back takes none at all — so a stick that stopped saving in March and stopped opening in June has simply been used up. The controller conceals the early part of that. Tired blocks get retired quietly for as long as there are spares to draw on, and the translation tables live on whatever silicon is still dependable. Run out of spares and those tables have nowhere to sit, at which point the stick goes quiet on the bus. On screen you get a controller with no further answers in it, and that says nothing whatever about the scans.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Flash | Matched the NAND against the library, lifted it off the board and read the die directly | Reads the NAND direct, past the controller, against a maker-ID library kept current |
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Peeled off the XOR mask, then put the pages back in the controller’s own order | Error correction, XOR mask, page order, reassembly — a raw NAND dump turned back into files |
| R-Studio Technician | Reassembled the FAT volume, and her own naming came back with it | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Which had failed first, the flash or the controller
USB returned nothing whatever. Off came the casing, and probes went onto the board. Approached direct, the memory answered straight away, and its part number was already in our library. The controller beside it stayed silent — which the order the symptoms had arrived in, writes first and reads later, had pointed at from the beginning.
Pull the pages first, work out the order later
What a chip read gives you is a long way from a disk image. The error-correction bytes come attached to every page, an XOR mask of the controller’s own choosing sits over the lot, and the ordering is whatever a translation layer that no longer exists decided on. Three things then have to go right: correct the errors, lift the mask, restore the order. All three and the files appear; one of them wrong and the output is noise.
Rebuild the volume, then check each item opens
Errors corrected and the order restored, the FAT tables read out cleanly and the archive appeared under the names she had given it. Every item was then opened by hand — the registers, the sale catalogues, the typed-up interviews. Counting files proves very little on its own; if a thing will not open, it has not come back.
What went back.
Fresh media carried the whole archive home. Three copies is the rule she works to now, one of which never leaves the house it lives in. The worn stick is still in a drawer, kept as a reminder of which way round the two failures came.
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Post it in as it is, switched off. Looking costs nothing, and you get one fixed figure in writing before any chargeable work begins — £250 + VAT for a card or stick, £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID and NAS. On most jobs, nothing is charged unless your data comes back.