Case Study — USB Flash Drive Recovery
The USB stick stopped being seen. The data hadn't gone.
A business client arrived at our Belfast office with a USB flash drive holding important company documents. No computer would recognise it any more. Removing the memory chip and imaging it directly recovered everything, for the fixed price quoted up front.
The situation
One bad disconnect, then nothing.
USB sticks fail for all sorts of reasons. This one came down to a single unsafe removal.
The client brought a failed USB flash drive in to our Belfast office. Every time it was plugged into a computer's USB port, the computer simply failed to recognise it — no drive letter, no prompt, nothing. The stick had been used to store important business files, and with the drive no longer working, the client urgently needed those documents back.
USB sticks can fail for a number of reasons, but in this case the cause was straightforward: the device had not been ejected properly before being unplugged. That interruption is enough to corrupt the drive's internal controller, leaving otherwise healthy memory completely unreachable through the normal USB connection.
Recovery
Going around the controller.
- 01
Controller ruled out
With the drive undetected across every port and machine tested, the fault sat with the controller rather than the memory itself — the usual result of an improper ejection.
- 02
TSOP48 chip removed
The drive's TSOP48 memory chip was desoldered from the circuit board, taking the unresponsive controller out of the process entirely.
- 03
Perfect disk image created
The chip was read directly and a complete, sector-accurate image of the drive was produced — the point at which the data was confirmed intact.
Outcome
Every file, at the price first quoted.
The client was quoted £349 + VAT for the recovery, with an honest caveat: chip-off work carries no guarantee until the chip has actually been read. In this case, every file on the drive was recovered — for the price quoted at the outset, with no surprises added afterwards.
Stop trying software fixes and repeated reconnections. Tell us what happened and we'll give you a straight answer on what's recoverable — and what it costs — before any work begins.