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 data recovery cost page.
Every usb stick / flash drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A plug bent or sheared off the board is bread-and-butter work — re-soldered under magnification, or the chip read directly.
Windows can tell something plugged in but gets no sense out of it — the controller or its firmware has gone.
The controller wakes with no mapping behind it, so the stick claims to be empty — solved with a chip-off and rebuild.
The index has corrupted while your files sit untouched behind it — decline the format and send it as-is.
Nothing is truly gone until it's overwritten — the moment you notice, stop using the stick.
Heat with no drive letter means a shorted controller or NAND chip slowly cooking — unplug it and get it to us.
A stick left sticking out of a laptop takes every knock going; the joints fracture but the memory chips ride it out.
Some sticks are one sealed block with no chip to remove — spider-board probes read the memory where it sits.
A trip through the washing machine is rarely fatal — the board is cleaned, dried properly and read on the bench.
When a shared stick shows only shortcuts, the true files are generally hidden or waiting to be 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.
Nine stick jobs in ten come down to chip work, which is exactly what the flash bench does all day:
Bypasses a dead controller entirely, reading the NAND memory itself and reconstructing the controller's logic in software — that's how a lifeless card or stick is reached.
Memory chips come off failed boards under precisely-controlled hot air and infrared heat, warm enough to release the solder, never enough to harm the data.
For sealed one-piece (monolith) cards and sticks with no chip to lift, hair-fine probes and a library of pinouts reach the memory in place.
Software that untangles XOR, ECC and wear-levelling, so a raw memory dump becomes your folders and files again.
Broken connectors and cracked tracks are rebuilt under magnification — with physical damage, that repair is often the entire recovery.
Every card and stick is read through a write-blocked reader, so the flash you sent stays exactly as it came.
The giveaway sticks from conferences and trade shows turn up as often as the big brands — what matters to recovery is the controller on the board, never the logo on the shell. 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 their media to us tracked and insured.
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.