The thesis, the payroll, ten years of family pictures — carried on a stick that just bent in a laptop port or died halfway through a copy. Flash drives reach us from every corner of Swindon and Wiltshire, and most go home again with their contents intact on fresh media.
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 twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Levered sideways by a knee or a bag — rebuilt under the microscope, or bypassed entirely with a direct NAND read.
Windows hears something arrive but gets garbage in reply — a controller or firmware fault talking over the data.
The controller starts up owning no map of its memory — chip-off reading plus a software rebuild returns the files.
A torn file table sitting on intact data; refuse the offer and send the stick as it stands.
Recoverable until the freed space is reused — the drawer is the stick's safest home from now on.
A shorted controller or NAND package quietly heating itself — unplug it and leave it unplugged.
Sticks left in ports get flexed until the joints fracture; the memory chips rarely notice.
Single-piece construction with no chip to lift — probed through the pinout archive instead.
Laundry sticks survive far more often than owners expect, once cleaned and dried properly at the bench.
Files hidden and replaced by links after a shared machine — the originals usually sit untouched behind the trick.
A '1TB' bargain looping over 16GB of genuine flash — the honestly written portion carves out cleanly.
SanDisk's best-seller has two famous exits: the snapped neck and the drop to 0MB — chip-off reading answers both.
Kingston DT100G3s freeze into unresponsive controllers; going straight to the NAND walks around the blockage.
Promotional freebies hide lottery-grade electronics; the controller found inside sets the recovery route, never the branding.
A stick that bowed without breaking usually carries hairline track fractures — repaired, then read in full.
SanDisk's nail-sized stick lives permanently in laptop ports, running hot until the controller gives out — a monolith probe job.
The metal sleeve parts company with the board, taking tracks with it — re-worked and imaged on the flash bench.
Samsung's MUF-BE4 unibody survives a lot, but keyring leverage eventually shears the connector root — pad repairs first, then imaging.
Kingston's long-bodied budget stick acts as its own crowbar in tight USB ports — cracked joints reflowed under magnification.
The all-metal Kyson bends rather than snaps, stressing the internal bond wires — read chip-direct when reflow isn't enough.
Pen drive, flash drive, memory stick — whatever you call it, its weak point is the joint between connector and circuit board, and a knee against a laptop is all it takes. Under the microscope we rebuild torn pads and fractured tracks; where the board itself is wrecked, the NAND chip comes off and is read directly, no working electronics required. Cruzer Blades with their famously fragile necks are practically a standing appointment on this bench.
Emptied the wrong folder, or plugged into a college machine and watched everything become shortcut icons? The data is almost always still on the flash — malware hides files far more often than it destroys them, and deletion only frees the space rather than scrubbing it. Retire the stick to a drawer immediately, then let us image it in full and carve the documents and photos out of that copy.
A stick job is chip work from start to finish, and the flash bench is fitted out for exactly that:
Reads raw NAND directly and re-implements the dead controller's logic in software — the route into sticks and cards that no longer answer at all.
Hot-air and infrared rework tuned to lift memory packages from ruined boards at temperatures the stored charge survives.
Needle-fine probe rigs and a pinout archive for one-piece cards and sticks where there is no separate chip to remove.
XOR masks, ECC and wear-levelling unpicked in software until a raw dump turns back into folders with their proper names.
Torn pads, cracked tracks and sheared connectors rebuilt under magnification — often the entire cure for a snapped stick.
Card and stick imaging runs through blocked readers, so the original flash stays exactly as it arrived.
Between them, the Cruzer Blade SDCZ50 and DataTraveler DT100G3 probably hold half of Wiltshire's coursework and invoices, and each fails in its own famous way — the Blade's neck snaps at the connector root, the DataTraveler's controller freezes solid. Both are solved routines here. Treat the conference freebies with suspicion: whatever silicon turned up cheapest that week is what's inside, and it decides the recovery method for us.
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 Oxford 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.