Devices · flash drives and USB sticks
People don't want to store important things on a flash drive; they do it anyway: a year of invoices with no other copies, or a copy taken one afternoon that was supposed to be temporary but now is all there is. The plug can pull out. The controller goes dead. Either way, the memory itself has usually come through, so this is where we begin. Photos of a Hungerford dealer’s stock, a dissertation from the Whiteknights campus, the quotes a Tilehurst sole trader keeps between jobs: each week, a few of these make their way to the Oxford intake lab, at £250 + VAT with the first look free.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Windows can't tell you anything about the device; it simply states: Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Nothing at all. The controller seems to have quit working | Stop trying ports |
| USB device not recognized | Enumeration never completes | One more port, then stop |
| Windows asks you to format the device before it can open it | The file system won't work, but the files are still there | Turn down the format offer |
| It mounts as empty (0 bytes), then asks you to insert a disk into removable disk | The controller cannot see its own memory | That one is chip-level work |
| 0x80070570 every time you open it: Windows reports the file is corrupted and unreadable | The FAT or exFAT structures are corrupted | Still recoverable while nothing further is written |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller has stopped permanently | That refusal is actually helping you |
A case number is assigned to your device when we receive it. An engineer then finds the real fault (free) before anything else occurs; you will be advised clearly of what will be returned and what will not, along with a single written price. Charges cannot begin until you have read this and accepted.
On an older stick, the memory package can be taken off its board and read separately. With a monolith, as is common nowadays, there is nothing to lift: memory and controller are cast into one solid lump, and the way in is a line of test pads a fraction of a millimetre across.
Wear levelling moves blocks about the die, and interleaving spreads them across the planes to increase performance. A raw read brings all of this back as a random mix, which is unpicked in software one layer at a time until files with real names and dates come back.
You get the list of files first. Nothing is billed until you have accepted it, and everything is returned on new media, with the return postage paid by us.
You look at the file list first and make a decision about what to do. We will never invoice anything until you have said yes, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. All of the information that we recover will be put on new media purchased by us specifically for this job, and our company pays the cost of postage back to you. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
Plain speaking about the statistics: no meaningful failure rates have been reported for consumer flash memory. USB sticks are not deployed in large fleets, and data centres count hard disk drives rather than these, so nobody has ever collected those numbers. All we can honestly describe is what reaches this bench, and the trend holds from one year to the next: physical failures are nearly all a connector separated from its circuit board, and those that fail without warning are typically unbranded, or were handed out at an exhibition.
A stick trampled into the floor of a site office contained 7 years' worth of invoices, the CIS records alongside them, and a return falling due. The connector had parted from the board. As this was a monolith, there was nothing left to plug into, so the controller's pinout was identified and the data pulled directly from the test pads. That return was filed by the deadline.
Rarely. The shell is simply there to carry the contacts, and the files live in the memory package underneath. In most cases a stick in two pieces can still be read, as long as the package and the resin around it came through unbroken.
No. The controller quit responding, but the memory underneath did not. Access that memory directly, and whatever the controller believes becomes irrelevant.
Cheap NAND running through a cheap controller. Some take it even further and lie about their capacity: a small die presented as a large one, behaving perfectly until you go over what is physically there. That may be fine for moving a film from one computer to another. It is never fine as the only copy of anything.
Only one: a memory die that is physically split right through. A stopped controller, a board in several pieces, mapping tables in disarray: that is an ordinary week here.
There is no charge for the look. You then receive a list of the files that opened, those that did not, and a fixed amount to complete the job. Keep it switched off until you have received that in writing.