The thesis, the payroll, ten years of family photographs, all carried on a USB stick that got bent in a laptop port or died somewhere during a copy. Flash drives are sent to us from across Swindon and Wiltshire, and most go back with their contents intact on new media. We do USB stick data recovery for everything from broken connectors to full chip-off reads, and with tracked post, USB flash drive recovery is available from anywhere in the UK.
We provide a free diagnostic on every USB stick and flash drive job. Before we begin any work, you will receive one fixed price quote in writing.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic and mechanical failures and chip-level work are 50% upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data, while BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. You'll find full pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Our process for each USB stick and flash drive job is to match the symptoms to the fault, and these twenty cover almost everything that comes to our bench.
A USB stick forced at an angle by a knee or a handbag is rebuilt under the microscope, or the connector is bypassed altogether with a direct NAND read.
Windows sees that something has arrived but gets rubbish coming back, which points to a controller or firmware fault talking over the data.
The controller boots without a map of its memory, so a chip-off read followed by a rebuild in software brings the files back.
The file table is badly damaged but the data underneath is intact. Decline the offer, get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then post us the stick exactly as it is.
The data can be recovered until the freed space is reused, so from now on the stick is safest in a drawer.
A shorted controller or NAND package can heat itself up without any sign, so unplug the stick and don't plug it back in.
Sticks left in ports get flexed until the joints break, though the memory chips almost never notice.
Because these sticks are built as one solid piece with no chip to lift, we read them by probing through our pinout archive instead.
Sticks that have been through the wash survive far more often than their owners expect, once they have been properly cleaned and dried on the bench.
After a spell on a shared machine, files can be hidden and replaced by links, but in most cases the original files sit untouched behind the trick.
A '1TB' bargain actually loops over only 16GB of genuine flash, and the part that was honestly written carves out cleanly.
The SanDisk best seller has two common exits, the snapped neck and the drop to 0MB, and chip-off reading deals with both.
Kingston DT100G3s freeze up into unresponsive controllers, but going straight to the NAND gets around the blockage.
Free promotional sticks contain all sorts of electronics, so it's the controller you find inside that sets the recovery route, never the branding.
A stick that bent without breaking usually has hairline cracks in its tracks, and these are repaired before it is read in full.
SanDisk's small, nail-sized stick stays inside the laptop port and runs hot until the controller fails, which makes this a monolith probe job.
When the metal sleeve breaks away from the board and takes some of the tracks with it, we repair the damage and image the stick on the flash bench.
Samsung's MUF-BE4 unibody survives a lot, but it does break in the end at the root of the connector when there's too much leverage on it from a key ring. So we repair the pads first, then image the stick.
Kingston's very long bodied, cheap sticks act as their own crowbar in a tight USB port, and when the joints crack we reflow them under magnification.
Kyson all metal sticks bend instead of snapping, which puts stress on the internal bond wires. If a reflow doesn't do it, we can read the chip directly.
Whatever your term of choice is for these devices (pen drive, flash drive or memory stick), they have one thing in common. The joint between the connector and the circuit board is the least reliable area, and a knee against a laptop is all that is needed to break it. In our lab we rebuild the broken pads and tracks under the microscope. If the board is destroyed beyond repair, we remove the NAND chip and read it directly without needing working electronics. With their well known weakness (fragile necks), Cruzer Blades come into the lab regularly.
Did you empty the wrong folder, or plug into a college computer and see all of your files turned into shortcuts? In most cases the information is still on the stick, as malware will hide files much more often than it will delete them. Deleting files does not scrub the information either; it simply frees up the space. So put the stick away in a drawer straight away. Next, we fully image it and then extract your documents and photos from that image.
All stick jobs are chip jobs from start to finish, so our flash bench is set up specifically for this type of work:
This reads the raw NAND directly and rebuilds the dead controller's logic in software, which is how we get into sticks and cards that no longer respond at all.
A hot air station and an infrared heater used together, set up so we can lift memory chips off ruined boards at temperatures low enough that the stored charge survives.
We have a collection of needle-fine probe rigs and a library of pinouts for one-piece cards and sticks, where there is no separate chip to remove.
All of the XOR masking, error correction coding (ECC) and wear levelling are unpicked at the software level, until a raw image dump becomes folders with their proper names once again.
Repairing torn pads, broken tracks and sheared connectors under magnification is very often the complete solution when a stick has snapped.
The process of imaging data from both cards and sticks is done through a write-blocked reader, so the original flash stays exactly as it arrived.
Our two most common sticks, the Cruzer Blade SDCZ50 and the DataTraveler DT100G3, probably hold about half of Wiltshire's coursework and invoices between them. Each has its own well known failure mode. The Blade will break off at the root of the connector (the neck), whereas the DataTraveler's controller will freeze completely. The repairs are routine for both. Be wary of conference freebies though, as they have whatever chip was cheapest that week inside, and that decides how we have to recover them.
Most customers get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then 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 (from a server, every disk, each labelled with its bay), as we don't offer a drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll ring you as soon as we've diagnosed your media.
Not sure what to send? Ring 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.