Nobody ever puts cash away for a dead USB stick: it costs less than a sandwich. And then all of a sudden one of them fails and it holds the only copy of a contract, a dissertation or a season’s worth of site photographs and now your most important documents are being held hostage by something that is almost worthless. Here’s why they die, the “free” to “bench” ladder and how to avoid the worst-case scenario when they do.
Cheap flash and barely any controller, plus a plug that works as a lever every time the laptop gets knocked, all of which live in a pocket. A stick is built for convenience not for keeping things safe.
More “dead” sticks than you’d think are simply good, but unlucky sticks; rule them out before spending money or time (it takes two minutes). Moving your flash drive to a new USB outlet can resolve the issue, especially if you’re using a PC with front panel USB ports or an unpowered hub that may be malfunctioning. Try using it on another computer altogether. If you have Windows, go into Disk Management (right click on Computer > Manage) to determine if your flash drive has been recognised by the operating system as a disk, but isn’t showing up as a usable device. Right-click on the disk and assign it a drive letter. This should “wake up” your flash drive. If you are running a Mac, open Disk Utility and see if your flash drive shows up as a greyed-out volume. Mount this volume. Many times these easy steps will solve many problems at no cost or risk.
If the stick is recognised by the system (stick is turned on) but asks for a format, reads as “RAW” or reports 0 bytes, or shows blank folders instead of the files formerly stored there, then the index of the stick has been damaged but most of your files remain intact. To recover your files, simply tell PhotoRec to ignore this index: run PhotoRec against the stick and have PhotoRec extract documents, pictures and videos from the flash drive to a folder located on your computer. Your recovered files will have no names attached; you’ll need to sort them; it’s a chore, but a good one. This rule works wherever: write nothing to the stick. Do not install tools to it; do not save the results back to it. And above all else, do not answer that format question: if you format the stick now, you’re laying new clean empty formats directly over your files’ final remnants. Fully format the stick after recovering your files, or just buy a replacement, given the corrupted flash inside. We also cover adjacent scenarios on our deleted file recovery and formatted media web pages.
No sign of life anywhere in ports, a bent or snapped off connector, a stick that heats up but then does absolutely nothing: that’s hardware. And hardware cannot be fixed by software because hardware will not allow enumeration to occur. The odds of success at this point depend on how much restraint you use. In most cases memory chips will survive connector trauma. However, with each new attempt to re-insert the stick and bend it back into place, the cracks in the joints holding the memory chip in place will become weaker. When attempting to recover data from a failed stick on our bench we have three options: micro-soldering the broken joint, transplant level repair of the memory chip to a working board, or reading the memory chip through the test pads that are exposed on the board, monolithic sticks included. Each option has very good success rates as long as the memory chip remains unharmed when it arrives. This is what our USB flash drive recovery service is based upon, providing a quote after the complimentary 48-hour diagnostic.
When the computer recognises the flash drive but cannot find all of its files, we recommend PhotoRec, free and without limit, designed to extract files directly from the flash drive regardless of whether the file hierarchy remains intact. Alternatively, if you lost files recently and the flash drive is recognised by the computer, you may wish to try Recuva on Windows, which appears less intimidating than PhotoRec. However, when your computer fails to recognise your flash drive, you’ve got a hardware failure and no software tool exists to assist you, because that is a hardware failure and attempting to employ software tools will likely make things worse.
This is likely because your table of contents has stopped parsing, an all-too-common occurrence when the stick gets yanked out mid-write, hauled around too many devices, or simply low-cost flash reaches the end of its usable life. The computer will ask if it can create a new blank index where your old (unreadable) table of contents currently resides. Your files will be hiding behind the unreadable table of contents, which is why you deny this request, pull them off first, and then format after.
Yes. Cheap budget sticks contain less expensive quality flash memory and the least capable controllers. A portion of the cheapest are fake: they’re a small chip reprogrammed to claim a large capacity, therefore causing corruption in every bit written beyond their true limits. Treat every stick like a transport device instead of a storage medium and purchase branded; there should never be only one copy of a file on any single stick.
Free 48-hour diagnostic in the lab: an honest verdict on solder-versus-chip-level and a written quote before work. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.