A grandmother in Netherton dropped the card taking it out of the camera and part of the plastic body came away, taking the little lock switch with it. The gold contacts looked untouched. In the PC it made a clicking noise and showed nothing. The photographs were from a christening that morning, and she asked what the cheapest way through this was.
| Media | An SD card that came apart in a fall, losing plastic down one side and its write-protect slider with it. Gold fingers unmarked. Pictures no longer showing. |
| What was reported | SD card, dropped, plastic casing broken away on one side, lock switch detached, metal contacts intact, a clicking noise from the PC and no images displayed, recovery sought at the lowest available cost. |
| Fault class | Physical damage to the card body. The flash die and its bond wires had survived, but the break had disturbed the card enough that a reader could not hold a reliable connection. The memory itself was undamaged. |
| On the bench | Examined under a stereo microscope with the fracture line mapped against the position of the memory die, tried first on a controlled card reader, then the flash read at chip level with the die desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer, the translation reconstructed, images carved by content signature with PhotoRec, validated by rendering and written to fresh media. |
An SD card is mostly empty plastic. The memory occupies a small part of the card near the contact end. A break through the other end takes away structure and takes away the lock switch, but need not have gone anywhere near the part that holds pictures.
The clicking was the computer, not the card. That noise is Windows detecting and dropping a device repeatedly, which is what happens when a damaged card cannot hold a stable connection. It sounds alarming and it means only that the connection is intermittent.
Intact contacts are the thing to look for. If the gold fingers are unmarked, the electrical path in is probably still viable, and a reader is worth trying under controlled conditions before anything more invasive.
The cheapest route is tried first, and it is not always the one that works. Reading through the card normally costs least. Chip-off, where the flash die is desoldered and read directly, costs the same headline price but is chip-level work with different terms. She was told which route was being tried and what it would mean before anything happened.
The card was examined under a stereo microscope and the fracture mapped against the position of the memory die, which sat clear of the break. A controlled card reader was tried first and the connection would not hold long enough to complete a read, which matched the clicking the PC had been doing.
The flash was then read at chip level: the die was desoldered under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer. The translation layer the card's controller had been performing was reconstructed from the raw dump, and the images carved out by content signature with PhotoRec. Every frame was validated by rendering it before being written to fresh media.
The christening photographs came back. They came back without their original filenames, which is what carving after a chip-off means, and were handed over in shot order by timestamp instead.
Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Chip-level work is carved out of no fix, no fee by the published terms, so 50% of the quote was payable upfront with the balance on success. The card did not survive the chip-off, which was explained before the work started.
Do not put it in a reader repeatedly, and do not tape it back together to make it fit. Each insertion of a cracked card risks flexing the board inside and breaking the bond wires between the die and the contacts, and those are the wires that decide whether an easy read is still possible. If the metal contacts are unmarked, the outlook is usually good even when the plastic looks wrecked. Put the card and any loose fragments into a small rigid box, do not use a padded envelope on its own, and post it in. What matters is the memory, and it lives at the contact end.
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.
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.