A USB memory stick came in with its connector snapped clean off and the little circuit board cracked — unreadable in any port, with the only copy of a set of work documents on it. A physically broken stick can't be fixed by software; the data has to be read from the flash itself. We did exactly that.
The stick had been snapped — left in a laptop and knocked, breaking the USB connector off the board and cracking the circuitry — and no computer would see it. On it were work documents and photos with no other copy. When a USB stick is physically broken, running recovery software is pointless (nothing can connect to it), so it was kept safe and brought in for chip-level work.
A USB flash drive stores its data in a NAND flash chip, managed by a small controller. When the connector snaps off or the board cracks, the electrical path between the flash and the outside world is broken — but the flash chip itself, and the data on it, usually survive the impact. Reaching that data means either restoring the connection or, where the board is too damaged, removing the flash chip and reading it directly, then reconstructing in software everything the broken controller would normally have done.
The board was examined under magnification. With the connector gone and traces damaged beyond a reliable repair, the NAND chip was removed and read directly on a specialist reader — a chip-off recovery. What that produces is raw flash: scrambled, error-coded and physically out of order, not yet files. The controller's specific handling for that stick had to be reconstructed to interpret it.
Turning the raw NAND into usable files meant reversing the flash-management layer: removing the manufacturer's scrambling, applying the correct error-correction to fix bit errors from the read, and rebuilding the translation that reorders physical flash pages into the logical sequence the file system expects. Once that layer was reconstructed the file system reappeared, and the documents and photos were extracted and checked.
Each recovered file was confirmed to open rather than merely appear in a list, then the set was returned on fresh media. About 95% came back, the small shortfall tied to flash areas affected by the physical damage. USB sticks are convenient but easily broken and easily lost — a reminder that they're for carrying data, not for being its only home, and that anything important needs a second copy.
Chip-off NAND removal and reading on a specialist programmer · de-scrambling, ECC correction and translation-layer rebuild · file-system reconstruction. All work carried out in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually, yes. The flash chip that holds your data typically survives a snapped connector or cracked board even when the stick won't connect. We read the flash directly and rebuild the files from it.
No — if it's physically broken, software can't help, and forcing it into a port can cause more damage. Keep the pieces together, don't try to power it, and send it in for a chip-level assessment.
Yes — the approach is the same across makers: reach the flash, rebuild the controller's logic, and extract the files. A free diagnostic will confirm what's recoverable.