Casebook entry · SSD & flash · EDR-2025-2939
A Season of Dusk-Survey Photographs, Suddenly Nowhere.
Between one barn job and the next, a Kingston 64GB simply stopped existing. An ecology practice near Wellington tried every port it owned — four laptops, a desktop, a powered hub — and not one of them will admit it's plugged in
: no chime, nothing in Disk Management, like plugging in nothing at all
. On it sat a season of dusk-survey photographs.
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In plain English.
When five computers and a powered hub all report nothing, the fault is travelling with the stick — that much testing acquits the machines entirely. Inside the housing only two culprits remain: the solder joints under the plug, flexed a little by every insertion, and the controller that speaks to the host on the memory's behalf. Both sit in front of the data, not inside it. The NAND keeps what it holds whether or not anyone can ask for it, and that is the door a lab goes through.
The tools this job took.
See how your case runs →| System | The part it played | Why we rate it |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Flash | Recognised the bare chip and dumped it, controller bypassed | Reads the memory chips themselves, matching each one against an up-to-date identification library |
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Unscrambled the dump — ECC, XOR, page order — into a logical image | Rebuilds files from a raw NAND dump — ECC, XOR, page transforms and reassembly |
| IR preheater & BGA rework station | Lifted the BGA cleanly and made it fit for the socket reader | Takes NAND chips off the board and reballs them without cooking the data |
On the bench.
Cheapest suspect first, under the microscope
A cracked joint at the plug is an hour's micro-soldering, so the stereo microscope came out before anything else. Every joint held; the board tracks were clean. On power the controller drew current and said nothing — silent on its data lines — which settled the diagnosis all that office testing had been pointing towards.
The bare chip read raw, no controller needed
With the package lifted and prepared, the NAND went into a socket reader and read out raw. That readout is the whole trade: a dead controller takes nothing with it — the memory still holds every page ever written, arranged to suit the controller's private filing scheme.
Undo the controller's filing scheme, recover the folders
In Rusolut the dump was corrected and untangled — error correction applied, the XOR pattern stripped, pages and blocks re-sequenced — until the controller's old logical view stood again. Only at that point did a filesystem exist, and with it the survey folders.
How it ended.
Back on new media in time for the planning submission — short of three stills from the final barn visit, which returned damaged and were flagged.
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Sound like your drive?
Every case here points the same way: power the device down, take the free diagnosis, then make your decision.