Somebody moved the computer in the office of a community centre in Toxteth and caught the memory stick sticking out of the front of it. No drama, nothing visibly broken, but from that moment on no machine in the building would recognise it. On it were the grant records and attendance registers for the year.
| Media | A USB flash drive knocked while the computer it was plugged into was being moved, no longer recognised by any machine, holding records with no other copy. |
| What was reported | USB stick, knocked while a computer was being moved, no longer recognised on any machine, no visible damage to the plug, records and registers needed. |
| Fault class | Physical, on the board. The knock cracked a solder joint at the controller and the drive could no longer enumerate. The NAND memory holding the files was undamaged. |
| On the bench | Plug, board and joints examined under a stereo microscope, the cracked joint reflowed and retested, and when the controller still failed to enumerate the NAND was desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer, the translation layer reconstructed, filesystem parsed in R-Studio, records validated and written to fresh media. |
A knock passes straight through the plug into the board. The plug is rigid and the board it is soldered to is not. Sideways force at the plug goes to the joints and the components nearest them, and a hairline crack there is invisible without magnification.
Not recognised means the controller cannot introduce itself. Enumeration is the first conversation a USB device has with a machine. If the controller is not being fed properly, or its own connections have cracked, that conversation never starts and the machine reports nothing plugged in.
The memory is a separate component from the thing that broke. Files live in the NAND. The NAND survives knocks well because it is a small chip flat against the board. What breaks is the plumbing around it.
When the repair does not take, the chip comes off. Reading the NAND directly means desoldering it, reading the raw contents on a programmer, and then reconstructing what the controller used to do in software. That is chip-level work. It is effective and it is deliberate, and it carries the same terms as any other physical job.
The plug, board and joints were examined under a stereo microscope, where a cracked joint at the controller was visible. It was reflowed and the drive retested, which is always tried first because reading through the drive's own controller avoids reconstructing the translation layer.
It still would not enumerate, so 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 the controller had been performing was reconstructed, and the filesystem parsed in R-Studio from the reconstructed image. The grant records and registers were validated by opening a spread of them and written to fresh media.
The year's records came back in full. The stick itself did not survive the process, which is what chip-off means, and that was made clear before the work started rather than after it.
Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. This was chip-level work, which the published terms carve out of no fix, no fee alongside electronic and mechanical failures, so 50% of the quote was payable upfront with the balance only on success.
Stop plugging it in. Each attempt powers a board with a crack in it, and a crack that is currently a broken connection can become a short. Do not wiggle it in the port to find an angle that works, because that is the movement that finishes the joint off. There is nothing to run and nothing to install: no software can help a device that never announces itself. Wrap it so nothing presses on the plug and post it in a small rigid box. Say what it was doing when the knock happened, because a stick knocked while writing needs different handling from one knocked while idle.
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 corruption error on a stick usually means the controller or the filesystem, and neither is the memory that holds your photographs
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.