One short message covers at least four separate faults, and only one of them has anything to do with your computer. A stick that cannot describe itself to Windows has usually lost its controller, or the flash sitting behind it, and your files are still in the memory waiting to be read out directly.
Pen drives and memory cards are £250 + VAT. The free diagnostic finishes 2 working days after your stick reaches the lab — chip-level work takes 50% of the quoted price upfront.
Windows prints the same balloon whether the stick lost its controller last night or the plug was snapped off in a laptop bag. Telling those apart is most of the diagnostic, and it decides whether the work takes an afternoon or a fortnight.
That appears when a device answers the port electrically but cannot say what it is. The stick has power and nothing else: the controller has failed, or the flash behind it will not respond, so no capacity and no serial number are ever handed over. Nothing installed on the computer can talk it round.
A drive letter appears and Windows immediately offers to format it. The stick is answering properly, so the electronics are alive, but the area holding the file system is unreadable. Refuse the offer. Formatting lays a fresh empty structure over one that is merely damaged.
A 64GB stick reporting 0 bytes, 8MB or 30MB has dropped into the boot mode its controller falls back on when it cannot load its own firmware and mapping tables out of the flash. That is a controller fault rather than a Windows fault, and it needs the memory reading directly.
Small and cheap drives are built as one sealed slab, with controller, memory and contacts in a single moulded package and no separate chip to remove. The way in is a set of test points on the body, wired out by hand under magnification and read with a programmer.
Somebody caught it with a knee under a desk and the metal connector tore away from the board. Much of the time the memory never noticed and the job is soldering rather than data recovery. Where the pads have lifted with the plug, wires go straight to whatever is left of the tracks.
Each fresh power-up asks a failing controller to rebuild the table that maps your files onto the memory, and hands it another chance to write a worse version of it. A stick that has been plugged in twice is a far better prospect than the same stick after forty attempts.
When a stick goes into a socket the computer asks it a short set of questions before anything else happens: what are you, who made you, how much power do you want, how big are you. That exchange takes a fraction of a second, and USB device not recognised means it broke down partway through. Windows never got as far as looking for a file system, which is why nothing on the machine makes any difference — not a driver reinstall, not Disk Management, not a recovery program. Try the stick once in a different computer, ideally one running a different operating system, and if it is unseen there as well then the stick itself is the fault.
Open one and you find two things: a NAND flash memory chip and a small controller. Flash cannot be written the way a hard drive is written. Pages are programmed, whole blocks are erased at a time, cells wear out with use, and every block carries a scattering of bit errors that must be corrected as they are read. The controller hides all of that behind a tidy fiction — a numbered list of sectors the computer can treat like a disk — and it keeps a translation table to maintain the illusion. That table is stored in the flash itself, alongside your data. When the controller cannot load or rebuild it, the fiction collapses. The stick then reports nothing, or a nonsense capacity, or asks to be formatted, and your files are still in the memory with no map pointing at them.
Where the controller is dead, the way in goes around it. The flash chip is removed under controlled heat, cleaned, and read in a programmer, which returns a raw dump of every page including the spare bytes at the end of each one. That dump is not a disk image and will not mount. The error correction still has to be applied, the scrambling the controller uses has to be reversed, and the blocks have to be put back into logical order before anything resembling a file system appears. Getting that reconstruction right is the real work, and it turns on knowing how the particular controller family arranged things. Only then is the image mounted read-only and your documents copied off it.
The USB plug takes all the leverage and none of the design effort. When it tears off, three things decide what follows. If the plug came away clean and the four pads on the board survived, it is a soldering job under a microscope and the stick reads normally afterwards. If the pads lifted with it, thin wires are run to what remains of the tracks and the stick is read once, on the bench, straight into an image. If the board itself cracked through, the flash comes off and goes to the programmer. All three sit in the same £250 + VAT band, and the free diagnostic says which one you have before you commit to anything.
Chip-level work is not covered by no fix, no fee. The published rule is printed as it stands: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Where the memory has to be read directly, or a torn connector rebuilt, 50% of the quoted price is payable before that stage begins and the balance when the data is ready. A stick that mounts and has a file system fault is logical work, and that does carry no fix, no fee.
Do not run a repair tool, do not let Windows check the drive for errors, and above all do not format it when it asks. Recovery software written for hard drives assumes it can see sectors; on a stick whose controller has failed there are no sectors to see, and on one that is half working the scanning keeps the flash busy at exactly the wrong moment. Pull it out of the machine and put it somewhere safe.
Every stick is worked on at the lab in Manchester — Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN — about 35 miles from the Liverpool waterfront and one working day away by tracked post. There is no collection service anywhere in this network and no counter in Liverpool to call at, so a padded envelope sent tracked and insured is how all of these arrive, whether from Bootle, Crosby, Speke or Ormskirk. The diagnostic is free and closes 2 working days after the stick lands. You then get one fixed figure in writing, £250 + VAT for a pen drive or a memory card, and nothing further happens until you say so. A straightforward recovery runs from 2-4 working days after that; chip work and moulded drives take longer, and there is no point pretending otherwise. If you would rather ask first, the freephone number is 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
Pen drives arrive from the university libraries in May with a dissertation on them and no other copy anywhere, from studios in the Baltic Triangle with a client edit that never reached the server, and from small firms across Merseyside where the stick in a desk drawer turned out to be the only backup anyone had made. The USB stick recovery page covers the device in general, memory card recovery does the same for SD and microSD at the same price, and where the stick is seen but behaves oddly, drive not showing up is the better starting point. Every band is set out on the data recovery cost page.
Post it tracked, have the fault named inside 2 working days, and see the price before anything is touched.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.