Devices · USB sticks & flash media
Nobody sets out to keep anything important on a memory stick. It happens anyway: the only copy of the accounts, or a backup that was meant to last a week and is now three years old. The plug can shear off and the controller can die; in both cases the flash inside usually comes through. That chip is where we start, and Birmingham sends a steady stream of them.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) — error Code 43 | Dead silence from the stick — the controller has stopped | Stop trying it in other ports |
| USB device not recognized | The stick never finishes enumerating | Try one more port, then stop altogether |
| You need to format the disk in drive X: | A broken file system over data that is fine | Never accept the offer to format |
| Please insert a disk into removable disk; shows 0 bytes | The controller has lost sight of its flash | This is chip-level work |
| Error 0x80070570 on open — file or directory is corrupted and unreadable | Damage to the FAT or exFAT structures | Fixable — but write nothing else to it |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller will not come back | Just as well it refused |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
An older stick will give up its memory package — off the board, read on its own. A monolith gives you nothing to lift: the flash and the controller are cast into one lump, so the route in is a set of test pads a few tenths of a millimetre across.
Wear levelling moves blocks about. Interleaving spreads them across planes for speed. The result is scrambled on the way out. Each layer is unpicked in software until real files, with names and dates on them, come back.
You see the list of what came off and approve it before a penny is charged, and everything goes back to you on new media.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
Straight answer on the odds: nobody publishes a failure rate for consumer flash that is worth relying on. Memory sticks are not run in fleets and audited the way hard drives are, so the figures do not exist. Our own intake is a narrow sample, but it says the same thing year after year: most of the physical damage that reaches us is a broken connector, and when one dies with no warning it is almost always a no-brand stick or a conference giveaway.
It had been trodden on in a site office until the connector parted from the board, taking seven years of invoices and the CIS records out of reach with the tax return due. A monolith leaves no port to work through, so the test pads were found and the controller pinout mapped here. Everything was filed on time.
Usually not. That plug is wiring, nothing more. Your files live in the memory package further down the board, and a stick that has broken clean in two will normally still read — provided the package itself, or the moulded wafer, came through without a crack.
No. That is the controller falling silent, not the flash underneath it. Go straight at the flash and what the controller does stops mattering.
Poor flash behind a poor controller. Some go further and lie about their size — a small die reporting itself as a big one, which behaves perfectly right up to the moment you write past what is actually there. Fine for moving a film from A to B. Not for anything you hold once.
One case only: a memory die cracked right through. Failed controllers, boards in several pieces, translation tables in a mess — that is a normal Tuesday at the bench.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.