They were married at St George's Hall and the photographs came home on a pen drive. A year later the stick would not open and threw a corruption error. Somebody described as a specialist told them it could not be recovered. They sent it anyway, which is the only reason there is a case file to write.
| Media | A USB flash drive holding wedding photographs, unusable and reporting a corruption error, previously assessed by another party as unrecoverable. |
| What was reported | USB stick, wedding photographs, unusable with a corruption error reported by Windows, a specialist reportedly advised that recovery was not possible, second opinion sought. |
| Fault class | The controller. The stick's own controller had failed, so it could no longer present the memory behind it or perform the translation that turns raw flash into files. The NAND itself was intact. |
| On the bench | Read behind a hardware write blocker, an attempt made through the stick's own controller first with no response, the NAND then desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer, the translation layer reconstructed from the raw dump, images carved by content signature with PhotoRec, validated by rendering and written to fresh media. |
A corruption error is a message about the map, not the pictures. Windows reports corruption when it cannot make sense of the structures describing the contents. It is not an inspection of the photographs and it is not evidence about them.
The controller is the part that usually fails on a stick. Every flash drive has a small controller doing the work of turning raw memory into something a computer can use, including wear levelling and remapping. When it dies the memory becomes unreachable rather than empty.
Chip-off goes around the controller entirely. The NAND is desoldered and read directly on a programmer, which gives raw memory contents with no order to them. The work is then in software: reconstructing the translation the controller used to do, and carving the images back out.
Cannot be recovered often means cannot be recovered with what I have. A general repair shop or a software-only outfit reaches its limit at a dead controller, which is a fair place to stop. It is not the same as a verdict on the memory, and the two get reported to customers as though they were.
The stick went behind a hardware write blocker and an attempt was made through its own controller first, because reading a stick normally is quicker and avoids reconstructing anything. It gave no response at all, which confirmed the controller.
The NAND was desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer. The raw dump was then put back into order: the translation layer was reconstructed, which on a multi-plane device is the substantial part of the work, and the images were carved out by content signature with PhotoRec. Every photograph was validated by rendering before being written to fresh media.
The wedding photographs came back. They came back as images without their original filenames, because that is what carving after a chip-off gives you, and were delivered in date order taken from the file headers.
Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Chip-level work is excluded from no fix, no fee by the published terms, so 50% of the quote was payable upfront and the balance only once they had seen the photographs. The stick itself was destroyed by the process, which was said plainly beforehand.
Do not accept any offer to repair or format it, and do not run free recovery tools that write their findings back to the same device. If the stick has stopped responding altogether, no software will help, because there is nothing for software to talk to. Keep it, even if you have been told it is finished, because a dead controller is a routine chip-off job and the memory behind it is usually perfectly intact. Post it in a small rigid box. Be aware that where the chip has to come off, the stick does not survive the process, and expect to be told that before the work starts.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Liverpool, Merseyside and the wider North West, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each one gives the reasoning behind the diagnosis, the method the fault actually called for, and the equipment it was worked on.
A bent plug is damage to the connector, and the memory that holds your files sits well behind it
A knocked stick that stops being recognised has cracked something between the plug and the memory, and the memory is usually fine
Flash soldered directly to a logic board sits outside what this lab takes in, and the honest answer is given before anything is posted
The diagnostic is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical faults run on no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.