A Lenovo Yoga's NVMe SSD simply disappeared — there one day, gone the next, with a professional's current client work on it. NVMe drives lean heavily on their controller, and when it fails the drive drops off entirely while the flash stays intact. We read the NAND directly and rebuilt the mapping to recover the files.
The Yoga had been working normally until its NVMe SSD stopped being detected altogether — not in Windows, not in the firmware setup. On it was a self-employed professional's active client work, with the last backup well out of date. A drive that disappears completely has usually suffered a controller failure rather than lost its data, so the drive was left alone rather than being repeatedly power-cycled, which does nothing on a dead controller.
An NVMe SSD is entirely dependent on its controller: the controller manages the flash, presents the drive to the system, and handles everything the computer sees. There's no simpler fallback interface behind it. So when the controller hangs or dies, the whole drive vanishes — yet the NAND flash underneath, where the data actually lives, is typically untouched. The task is to bypass the failed controller and read the flash directly, then rebuild in software everything the controller would normally do.
With the controller unresponsive, the NAND was read directly rather than through the drive's normal interface. What that produces is raw flash — scrambled, error-coded and physically out of order — which is not yet usable data. The controller's specific handling for that drive had to be reconstructed to make sense of it.
Turning the raw NAND into files meant removing the controller's scrambling, applying the correct error-correction to fix read-time bit errors, and rebuilding the translator that maps logical blocks to physical flash pages. With the mapping reconstructed the logical drive returned to order, the file system reappeared, and the client work and documents were extracted with their names and folders intact.
Files were opened across the recovered set to confirm they were whole, then returned on fresh media. About 97% came back. As with any SSD, the failure came without warning — and for someone whose livelihood is on the drive, an automatic backup of active work is the cheapest protection against exactly this.
Direct NAND reading past a failed controller · de-scrambling, ECC correction and translator (FTL) reconstruction · file-system rebuild. 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. A drive that vanishes has typically suffered a controller failure while the flash — and your data — stays intact. We read the NAND directly and rebuild the mapping to recover the files.
SSDs depend heavily on their controller, and a controller fault takes the whole drive offline at once, with no gradual warning. The good news is the data on the flash is usually still there to recover.
Yes — the approach is the same across makers: bypass the failed controller, read the flash, and rebuild the drive's logic in software. A free diagnostic will confirm what's recoverable.