Memory cards · bench notes · ADR-2025-3461
The Casing Gave; the Memory Did Not.
The card bent in half and now won't load images
, and she sent photographs of the damage before anything else, which is exactly the right first move. Part of the outer casing had broken away and was not to be found. Her own reading was hopeful and, as it turned out, reasonable: she believed the memory card as a whole is still intact
underneath the damage, and what she wanted back were the pictures. Nothing had been forced into a reader since it happened, which is the other thing that went right here.
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What failed, and why.
There is less card in a card than people expect. The pictures live in one small memory chip; nearly everything round it is moulded plastic, and between that chip and the gold pads run connections finer than the eye resolves. A bend breaks those first. It can also split the chip, and that is the one outcome that ends the matter, which is why the damage is examined under magnification first. How to read it is a separate question from whether the pictures came through. Where the connections hold, a controlled reader will do it without flexing the card again; where they do not, the memory is read directly. Cards and sticks sit at £250 + VAT, and the examination that decides it is free.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Error correction applied to the raw pages, then the pages put back into order | A raw NAND dump rebuilt: ECC, XOR mask, page order, and then files |
| IR preheat & BGA rework station | Heat used briefly and under control, only as far as freeing the memory | Warm enough to free the chip and reball its pads, never warm enough to harm what it holds |
| PC-3000 Flash | The chip identified against the library here and its layout mapped before power | Reads flash directly off the chips, going round the controller, with a maker-ID library kept current here |
What the bench did with it.
What the magnification settled
The card was examined under a stereo microscope before it went anywhere near a reader. The break, the run of the internal traces and the chip itself were examined in turn, and the chip was the part that mattered: no split, and no sign the bend had reached it at all. Seen once in that state it stops being a broken card and becomes an ordinary chip-level job with a known route through it.
The reader route, and the route past it
Where the connections survive, a card can be read on a controlled reader behind a write blocker without being flexed again, and that is always tried first because it is the least eventful thing anybody can do to it. Where they do not survive, the memory is reached directly instead. That route is slower, and it changes everything that has to happen afterwards, so which of the two applies is settled under the microscope rather than by trying.
Raw pages come first, and pictures long after
A chip read directly hands over its pages in whatever order the controller put them there, which is not an order anything else would have chosen. Error correction runs first. The pages are then returned to their real sequence, and only at that point is there a file system to build a picture out of. The distance between a chip dump and a photograph is where the work in this job actually sits.
What went home.
Every picture was rendered here before any of it was sent, and it all went home on fresh media. The card was beyond keeping. What was on it was not.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
More jobs off camera cards.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Prices are published and fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are priced at £250 + VAT. A drive on its own comes to £300 + VAT. Anything holding a second disk, whether RAID, NAS or a server, opens at £500 + VAT. The first look costs nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed and in writing before a penny is charged. Switch it off and post it in. Most jobs carry no fee where no files return.