Devices · USB sticks & flash media
Memory sticks, in Exeter as anywhere, collect the important stuff almost by accident: the only copy of the accounts, a 'temporary' backup that's quietly turned three. Break the plug or kill the controller and the flash itself usually pulls through — and the chip is exactly where we start.
Talk it over with an engineer
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| What it says | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) — Code 43 | Silence from the stick — its controller has failed | Stop trying it in ports |
| USB device not recognized | No hello from the controller | Try one other port, then set it aside |
| You need to format the disk in drive X: | Healthy data under a broken file system | Say no to formatting |
| Please insert a disk into removable disk (0 bytes) | Its controller can no longer see the NAND | Chip-level work on the bench |
| Error 0x80070570: file or directory is corrupted and unreadable | Corruption inside the FAT or exFAT tables | Mendable — add no more writes |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | Its controller is gone for good | Lucky the format failed |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
On an older stick the NAND package can come off and be read by itself. Monoliths fuse memory and controller into one slab, so the reading happens through tiny test pads instead.
A controller shuffles blocks for wear levelling, interleaves everything and scrambles it for luck. Software unwinds each of those steps until actual files surface again.
You approve the recovered file list before any fee exists, and everything comes home on fresh media.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
Straight talk about the odds: consumer flash has no trustworthy public failure statistics — no one fleets memory sticks and publishes numbers as happens with hard drives. From our own bench: snapped connectors dominate the physical damage, and the sudden total deaths cluster in unbranded and promotional sticks.
Crushed underfoot in a site office, connector torn right off. The monolith had to be read through its test pads, its controller pinout mapped from nothing. Seven years' worth of invoices and CIS paperwork came back with the tax deadline still ahead.
Nearly always. The plug is just the plug; the files live in the NAND chip further up the board. A stick snapped clean in half will often still read, so long as the chip itself — or the monolith wafer — isn't cracked.
No — the controller has stopped answering; the chip isn't empty. Reading the NAND directly cuts the controller out entirely.
Budget sticks pair second-rate flash with flimsy controllers, and some simply lie about capacity: a small chip dressed up as a big one, fine until you write past what's really there. Use one to ferry a film about, but never as the sole copy of something that matters.
Only one fault is truly final: the memory die itself cracked through. Everything else — dead controllers, snapped boards, scrambled tables — is routine work at chip level.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.