Logical & corruption · bench notes · RDG-2025-2082
Every File Still Listed. Every One of Them Zero.
In Lower Earley she pulled the stick from a laptop mid-save — I didn't wait, I just pulled it straight out
— and thought no more about it that evening. By morning the folder was still showing the lot: portfolio, both assignments, every filename where it should be, and beside each one a size of 0 bytes
, an empty type column, and the word File
. Two of them refused to open. Her mentor on the ward said the useful thing: stop prodding at it and get someone to look
.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
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What actually caused it.
A FAT volume is a catalogue plus a warehouse, and the two are kept well apart. The catalogue is a short table listing each file's name, its type, its size and the cluster it begins at. The warehouse is the rest of the chip, and it is indifferent to whether the catalogue is accurate. Interrupt a catalogue update and one record is left unfinished — size reduced to nought, type blank — while the file itself lies untouched exactly where it was put. Windows recites the catalogue without checking it, so a term's work reads as an empty folder. Cards and sticks are published at £250 + VAT, and finding out which fault you have costs nothing at all.
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 | Read the chip sector by sector, taking the filesystem's word for nothing | Reads the NAND direct, past the controller, against a maker-ID library kept current |
| R-Studio Technician | Repaired the damaged entries against FAT's second copy | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Carved by file signature where an entry was past mending | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Image it before anything else is allowed to happen
Power a flash stick and its controller starts housekeeping of its own accord — wear levelling, garbage collection — with no regard whatever for the blocks a recovery will want later. So nothing was diagnosed until the whole chip had been read off flat onto bench storage. After that, no later step could take a file away from her.
Use whichever copy of the table came off better
FAT keeps two allocation tables, not one, and the interrupted write had not treated them alike. Wherever the better table lined up with a directory record still whole, the file went back complete — name, size, and the entire cluster chain intact. That returns the original document, not something reassembled afterwards to look like it.
What was left had to identify itself
The few records past mending left their files to declare themselves. Raw clusters were searched for Word and PDF headers; the bytes running on from each header were reassembled in sequence; and a filename went on only where the header, or the first legible lines inside, would justify one.
What went back.
Most of the portfolio came back wearing its own filenames. The carved remainder arrived under machine-generated ones, and an evening went on putting those in order. A new stick carried the lot home, with one instruction attached: let the write finish before it leaves the socket. The figure had been agreed in writing before any work started — £250 + VAT, the published band for a stick.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
More jobs on lost files and bad volumes.
If that sounds like yours, stop there.
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.