USB sticks hold dissertations, business accounts and years of family photos, and then they get snapped off in a laptop port or simply stop working without warning. We recover flash drives and pen drives for customers across Sheffield every day.
Free diagnostic on every USB stick / flash drive job. We will provide a single fixed quote in writing prior to doing any work on your USB stick or flash drive.
On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. For electronic, mechanical and chip-level work, we'll take half up front and the rest only if we're able to recover your data. Jobs involving BitLocker, ransomware, forensic or CCTV/DVR work are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Complete pricing can be found on the data recovery cost page.
Every USB stick or flash drive job starts by identifying the fault from the symptoms. These ten faults cover nearly everything that reaches the bench.
The USB connector has either bent or broken off the circuit board, and micro-soldering rework or a chip-off read will allow it to be recovered.
There is either a faulty controller or faulty firmware: Windows recognises the device as being attached but cannot communicate with it.
The controller boots without a valid mapping, which will require a complete chip-off and reconstruction.
The file system has become corrupted, but the files still exist below the broken directory listing (index).
Stop using the stick immediately once you realise files are missing; recovering them is possible, but only until they are overwritten.
The controller or NAND memory chip has shorted and is cooking itself. Stop powering it now, get a quote for recovery and send it to us.
Sticks left in laptops take knocks, and fractured joints then cause poor connections while the chips remain viable: the problem lies in the connection, not the memory.
One-piece sticks with no removable chip can be read directly through spider-board probe adapters.
Generally, a stick that has gone through the wash cycle can still be recovered: it is cleaned, dried and read at the bench.
Shortcuts replace folders on shared sticks, and the actual files are typically hidden or carved from an image.
Call it a USB flash drive, a pen drive or a memory stick, it will fit into a jiffy bag, which makes this our most common post-in job from Sheffield. The classic fault is physical damage such as snapped connectors, cracked solder joints and boards bent in ports. These are very recoverable: we repair or bypass the damaged connector and read the memory directly. Electrical failures and corrupted controllers are treated the same way, with the memory read chip-off if the circuit board is past repair.
Deleted a folder from the stick, or found that your files have been replaced by shortcuts after a virus infection? Do not continue to use the stick. We create an exact copy of the flash memory (an image), then carve your documents and photos out of the raw data. The less you use the stick afterwards, the better the chance of recovering your lost files.
Approximately 90% of all stick recovery jobs involve chip-level work, and our flash bench is designed to handle exactly this type of work:
Reads NAND memory directly and rebuilds the controller's logic in software, giving us a 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.
Repairing connectors and traces on snapped sticks and cracked boards, which is often the whole fix for physical damage.
Card and USB imaging goes through write-blocked readers, so the original media is never altered.
Even with an unbranded conference giveaway stick holding half the world's coursework, it is always the controller inside rather than its label that determines the method.
Our customers get a quote first before sending their media to us, either by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or by completing our free online diagnostic. Once a customer has their quote, they post their media to us, tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from your machine and send us just the drive; we do not offer an internal drive-removal service. If you have a server or RAID system, please send us every disk, each clearly labelled with its bay. We cannot recover data from storage that is soldered directly onto the motherboard (for example Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), so we need removable drives to be sent to us. If you are unsure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark your package for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery and we will contact you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure about what to send? Call us first on 0800 689 0668 or complete our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote and, in most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.