USB sticks carry dissertations, company accounts and years of family photos — then snap off in a laptop port or simply die with no warning at all. We recover flash drives and pen drives for customers across Staines and the Spelthorne area day in, day out.
Free diagnostic on every usb stick / flash drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the free diagnostic page.
Every usb stick / flash drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve 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.
SanDisk Cruzer and Kingston DataTraveler sticks often drop to 0MB when the controller firmware corrupts — a chip-off read recovers the NAND.
Budget PNY and Integral sticks are frequently one-piece monoliths with no removable chip, read only via spider-board probing.
A USB stick slips into a jiffy bag, which makes it our single most common post-in job from around Staines. Physical damage — snapped connectors, cracked solder joints, boards bent inside 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, reading the NAND chip-off when the board itself is beyond saving.
Deleted a folder from the stick, or found your files swapped for shortcuts after a virus? Stop using it immediately. We image the flash and carve your documents and photos back out of the raw data — and the less the stick is touched after the event, the more of it comes home.
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. SanDisk Cruzer and Kingston DataTraveler sticks typically drop to 0MB when the controller firmware corrupts; PNY and Integral budget sticks are often one-piece monoliths with no removable chip; and a stick snapped at the connector is usually recoverable as long as the NAND itself survived the break.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR 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. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Guildford 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.