Flash & SSD · case notes · RDG-2025-2089
Five Machines and a Powered Hub. Nothing.
It had worked at one pond and refused at the next. An ecological consultancy in Didcot walked the stick round every machine in the office — two desktops, three laptops, then a powered hub bought specially — with the same result each time: not a flicker out of any of them
. No chime. Nothing under Disk Management. The surveyor's own summary: you might as well be pushing in a pebble
. On the stick sat an entire season of newt survey photographs, and behind them a licence deadline.
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What actually caused it.
Six hosts in a row saying nothing takes the computers out of the enquiry and puts the fault inside the plastic, where there are only two things it can be. The metal connector is soldered to pads that take a small flex every time the stick meets a port. Next to it sits the controller, whose job is to speak to a host on the memory's behalf. Neither part holds a single photograph. Both simply stand in the way of the memory, and memory holds on to what was written into it long after the parts around it have failed. That is the point at which a lab takes over, and cards and sticks are published at £250 + VAT.
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 | The memory package read on its own, controller removed from the path | Reads the NAND direct, past the controller, against a maker-ID library kept current |
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Dump turned back into a logical image: correction codes, then XOR, then page and block order | Error correction, XOR mask, page order, reassembly — a raw NAND dump turned back into files |
| Infrared preheater & BGA rework station | BGA lifted off intact, its pads dressed to seat in the socket adapter | Warm enough to release the chip and reball its pads, and never hot enough to put the data at risk |
What the bench did.
Try the hour-long repair before anything else
The stereo microscope came first. Where a hairline crack has opened in the solder beneath a connector, the fix is an iron and about an hour, and the stick is readable again — but there was nothing of the sort here. Joints whole, tracks continuous. Under bench power the controller took the current it should have taken while its data lines stayed mute — precisely what the office had been experiencing.
Go to the memory, and leave the controller out
The package came off, the pads were cleaned, and a socket adapter carried it for a raw read. Everything else follows from one fact: when a controller fails it takes nothing with it. The contents remain in the silicon, arranged in whatever order that particular chip was using on the day.
Rebuild the order and the folders come back
Rusolut went to work on the dump: correction codes applied, the XOR resolved, pages and blocks put back into the positions they had occupied, until the arrangement the failed controller used to present existed again. A filesystem mounted on top of it, survey folders and all.
What went back.
New media carried the photographs back, three frames short, and the licence deadline was still ahead of them. Those frames were taken on the final pond visit and came back damaged; the report names them rather than rounding the loss into a percentage. The rest of the season is intact.
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More from the flash and SSD file.
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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.