A Lexar microSD came in cracked and unreadable, with the only copies of a family's photos and video on it. A physically damaged card can't be recovered by software — the data has to be read straight from the flash. We recovered the raw NAND and rebuilt the files from it.
The card arrived physically damaged — cracked, with no reliable connection when inserted, so no computer or camera could see it. On it were the only copies of a large set of family photographs and video. When a card is damaged like this, running recovery software is pointless and can even finish it off; the data has to be reached at the level of the memory itself.
A modern microSD is a monolith: the controller chip and the NAND flash that stores the data are fused together inside a single sliver of epoxy, with no separate, removable memory chip. There is nothing to unplug and no standard interface left once the card is damaged. Recovering it means either restoring a working connection to the internal flash or bypassing the dead controller entirely and reading the raw NAND directly — then undoing, in software, everything the controller would normally do automatically.
Under magnification the card was cleaned and its damage assessed, and the internal test points — the tiny contacts that expose the raw flash beneath the epoxy — were located and used to read the NAND directly, sidestepping the broken controller. Raw NAND on its own is not usable data: it is a scrambled, error-coded, out-of-order dump. The controller's specific behaviour for that card had to be reconstructed to make sense of it.
Turning the raw dump into files meant reversing the flash-management layer step by step: removing the manufacturer's scrambling, applying the correct error-correction to fix bit errors picked up in the read, and rebuilding the translation map that reorders physical flash pages back into the logical sequence the file system expects. Once that layer was reconstructed the file system reappeared, and from it the photographs and video were extracted and validated.
Each recovered image and clip was checked to confirm it opened cleanly rather than simply appearing in a list, then the set was returned on fresh media. Around 96% of the content came back; the small shortfall corresponded to flash pages too degraded by the physical damage to read reliably. Because these were irreplaceable family memories with no other copy, we were glad the card had been switched off and sent in rather than repeatedly retried in a reader.
Stereo microscope · monolith test-point access to read raw NAND · NAND read with ECC correction, de-scrambling and translation-layer rebuild. All work carried out in-house in controlled clean conditions 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.
Not necessarily. The flash that stores your data often survives physical damage even when the card won't connect. We read the NAND directly and rebuild the files from it, so a broken card is frequently still recoverable.
No. If the card is physically damaged, software can't help and repeated attempts to read it can make things worse. Stop, keep the card safe, and send it in for a proper chip-level assessment.
Yes — SD, microSD and CompactFlash from all the major makers. The approach is the same: reach the flash, rebuild the controller's logic, and extract the files.