Devices · USB sticks & flash drives
A memory stick is nobody's plan for something that matters. It ends up holding it anyway — the accounts, with nothing kept anywhere else, or a stopgap backup nobody has replaced in three years. Plugs snap off. Controllers stop replying. The flash inside is usually unharmed either way, and that chip is where the work starts. They come in from Hull most weeks.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| Device Manager shows Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Nothing at all from the stick. The controller has stopped | Stop trying different ports |
| USB device not recognized | It never completes enumeration | Try one other port, then stop |
| Format the disk before you can use it | The file system is damaged, the data is not | Say no when it offers to format |
| Please insert a disk into removable disk, with 0 bytes shown | The controller has lost sight of its own flash | It needs chip-level work |
| 0x80070570 on open — file or directory corrupted and unreadable | The FAT or exFAT structures have been damaged | Fixable, provided nothing else gets written |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller will not come back | That refusal is doing you a favour |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
Take an older stick apart and the memory package comes off the board to be read by itself. A monolith offers nothing to remove: flash and controller are set in one block. The way in is a row of test pads, each of them a fraction of a millimetre wide.
Blocks get moved around by wear levelling. Interleaving splits them over planes for speed. What comes off the chip carries both. It is unpicked in software, a layer at a time, until files with real names and dates on them turn up again.
You get the file list first. Nothing is charged until you agree to it. What comes back arrives on fresh media.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
An honest note on the odds: no failure rate for consumer flash has ever been published that is worth quoting. These things are not run in fleets, and nobody audits them the way a data centre audits its hard disks, so the figures were never gathered. What we see is a narrow sample. It says the same thing every year: nearly all the physical damage is a broken connector, and the sticks that die with no warning are usually unbranded or given away at a conference.
It went under a boot on a site office floor, and the connector left the board. Seven years of invoices were on it, the CIS records with them, and a tax return was due. A monolith gives you no socket to work through, so the controller pinout was traced and the read taken off the test pads. The return went in on time.
Usually not. The plug is only a contact. Your files sit in the memory package behind it, and a stick in two halves will normally still read — unless the package itself, or the moulded wafer around it, has taken a crack.
No. The controller has stopped talking; the flash sitting under it has not. Read that flash on its own and the controller no longer matters.
Cheap flash, and a cheap controller in front of it. Some sticks also misstate their size — a small die dressed up as a big one, which behaves faultlessly right up to the point you write past the memory that exists. Fine for carrying a film about. Not fine as the only copy.
Only one: a memory die cracked from end to end. Dead controllers, a board in several pieces, translation tables in disarray — that is just an ordinary week here.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.