A whole dissertation, the company accounts, a decade of photos — trusted to a stick the size of a thumb, which then bends in a port or dies mid-copy. Flash drives and pen drives arrive at our lab from all over Swansea, and the little envelope they travel in is usually followed home by the data.
Free diagnostic on every usb stick / flash drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every usb stick / flash drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Levered sideways in a port — re-soldered under magnification, or bypassed entirely for a direct memory read.
Windows sees something attach but gets gibberish back — controller or firmware failure.
The controller wakes with no map of its own memory — a chip-off and rebuild job.
A broken file table sitting over intact data; never accept the offer.
Present until overwritten — the drawer, not the port, is the right place for the stick now.
A shorted controller or NAND chip slowly heating itself — unplug it for good.
Sticks left in laptop ports flex until the joints fracture; the chips rarely care.
One-piece construction with nothing to remove — probed straight through the pinout library.
Sticks survive the laundry surprisingly often once properly cleaned and dried at the bench.
Files hidden and replaced with links on a shared machine — the originals are usually still present.
A '1TB' marketplace bargain looping over 16GB of real flash — the genuine content is carved out.
SanDisk Cruzer Blades drop to zero capacity when firmware corrupts — the NAND reads fine chip-off.
Kingston DTs freeze into an unresponsive state; direct NAND reads go around the dead controller.
Promotional freebies hide lottery-grade controllers; the chip inside dictates the method, never the logo.
A stick that bent without breaking often has hairline track damage only — repaired and read in full.
Whatever you call it — flash drive, pen drive, memory stick — it posts for pennies, which makes it the single most common item in our Swansea post tray. Sticks levered sideways in ports, cracked solder joints, boards folded at the connector: all classic, all very fixable. We re-work the broken joint under the microscope, or bypass the board entirely and read the NAND itself when the electronics are past saving.
Deleted a folder you needed, or plugged into a shared machine and found every file turned into a shortcut? Stop using the stick immediately — nothing overwrites, nothing is lost twice. We image the flash in full, then carve the documents, spreadsheets and pictures out of that raw copy. The less the stick is handled after the mistake, the fuller the result.
Stick recovery is chip work first and last, and the flash bench is set up for exactly that:
Talks straight to raw NAND and rebuilds the dead controller's logic in software — how a lifeless stick or card gives up its contents.
Controlled hot-air and infrared rework lifts memory chips off failed boards at temperatures the data inside can tolerate.
Fine-pitch probe adapters and a growing pinout library reach the memory inside one-piece cards and sticks that have no chip to remove.
XOR patterns, ECC and wear-levelling are unpicked in software until a raw dump reads as your folders and files again.
Snapped connectors and fractured tracks re-worked under magnification — frequently the entire repair for physical damage.
Cards and sticks image through blocked readers, keeping the original flash untouched from arrival to return.
Cruzer Blades and DataTravelers hold half of South Wales's coursework and accounts between them, and both have a signature failure — the Cruzer's drop to 0MB and the DataTraveler's frozen controller — that chip-off reading solves. The freebie sticks from conferences are wildcards inside: the controller we find on the board picks the recovery route.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.