USB sticks carry dissertations, business accounts and years of family photos — then get snapped in a laptop port or simply die without warning. We recover flash drives and pen drives for customers across Sheffield daily.
Free diagnostic on every usb stick / flash drive job. Fixed quote before any work — and no fix, no fee.
Every usb stick / flash drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these ten cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The USB plug bends or breaks off the board — micro-soldering re-work or a chip-off read recovers it.
Controller or firmware failure; Windows sees something attach but can't talk to it.
The controller boots with no valid mapping — a straight chip-off and reconstruction job.
Corrupted file system — the files sit intact beneath the broken index.
Recoverable until overwritten; stop using the stick the moment you notice.
A shorted controller or NAND chip cooking itself — stop powering it and send it in.
Sticks left in laptops take knocks; fractured joints kill the connection while the chips survive.
One-piece sticks with no removable chip — read directly through spider-board probe adapters.
Through the laundry is survivable more often than not — cleaned, dried and read at the bench.
Folders replaced by shortcuts on shared sticks; the real files are usually hidden or carved from an image.
A USB stick fits in a jiffy bag, which makes this our most common post-in job from Sheffield. Physical damage — snapped connectors, cracked solder joints, boards bent in ports — is the classic failure, and it's very recoverable: we repair or bypass the damaged connector and read the memory directly. Electrical failures and corrupted controllers are handled the same way, with the NAND read chip-off if the board is beyond repair.
Deleted a folder from the stick, or found your files replaced by shortcuts after a virus? Stop using the stick straight away. We image the flash and carve your documents and photos out of the raw data — the less the stick is used after the event, the more comes back.
Stick recovery is 90% chip work, and the flash bench is built for it:
Reads NAND memory directly and rebuilds the controller's logic in software — the route in when a stick or card is dead.
Hot-air and infrared rework tools for lifting NAND chips from dead boards without cooking the data inside them.
Fine-pitch probe adapters and a pinout library for one-piece (monolith) cards and sticks where there's no chip to remove.
XOR, ECC and wear-levelling analysis that turns raw NAND dumps back into your actual files and folders.
Connector re-work and trace repair for snapped sticks and cracked boards — often the whole fix for physical damage.
Card and USB imaging goes through write-blocked readers, so the original media is never altered.
Including the unbranded conference-freebie sticks that hold half the world's coursework — the controller inside decides the method, not the logo.
Most customers post or courier their device to us — it arrives next morning, and the free diagnostic starts the day it lands.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac 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. If the storage is soldered in (e.g. Apple Silicon), call us first on 0800 689 0668.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Leeds 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.