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
. She took photos of the broken parts of the card and sent these to us immediately, and this was the right way to start. Part of the outside casing had broken away and could not be found. She was optimistic about her own assessment and, as it turned out, her optimism was justified: she believed the memory card as a whole is still intact
underneath the damage, and what she wanted back were the pictures. No attempt had been made to force the card into a reader after it became damaged. This was another positive in terms of how things proceeded.
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What failed, and why.
There's less than people think there is to a card. Pictures live on one small chip of memory. Nearly everything else around the chip is moulded plastic. Between the memory chip and the gold contacts are thin connections, smaller than we can see. A bend breaks these first. A bend may also split the chip, and that is the one outcome that will end the matter, which is why the damage is examined under magnification before anything else is done. The question about how to read the data is separate from whether the pictures came through. Where the connections remain intact, a controlled reader will retrieve data from the card without bending the card further. Where they are too badly damaged to allow that, the memory can be read directly. The standard charge for cards and sticks is £250 + VAT. The examination that determines whether or not your card is recoverable 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 | Applied error correction to raw pages. Put raw pages back into order. | Rebuilt raw NAND dump: ECC, XOR mask, page order, files. |
| IR preheat & BGA rework station | Used heat but only long enough to release the memory. Used heat carefully and in moderation. | Heat applied long enough to release the chip and re-ball its pads, but never hot enough to harm what’s inside. |
| PC-3000 Flash | Identified chip against library here. Mapped layout of chip before powering on. | Directly reads the flash off the chips, going around the controller, with a maker-ID library kept updated here |
What the bench did with it.
What the magnification settled
The card was looked at using a stereo-microscope before it was taken to a reader. The break, the run of the internal traces and the chip itself were each looked at individually. The only thing that mattered was the chip; it hadn’t been cracked and didn’t show signs that the bend had affected it at all. Once seen in that condition it ceased to be a broken card and became simply a typical chip-level job with a definite path through it.
The reader route, and the route past it
If the connections still survive, then a card can be read using a controlled reader behind a write blocker without being flexed again. Since it is the least eventful action you can take with respect to a card, this always takes place first. Where the connections don’t survive, then instead the memory has to be reached directly rather than through an external reader. As this path requires more time, and changes many things that must happen next, which route applies is determined by looking at the condition under a stereo-microscope rather than trying out various actions on the card.
Raw pages come first, and pictures long after
When a chip is read directly, it gives access to the chip's pages in whatever order they were placed in by the chip's controller. That is not the order in which most people would like to see things, however. First, error-correcting code has to run on those pages. Then, the pages have to be reordered into their proper sequence. Only then can a file system be rebuilt from those pages and a picture reconstructed. This is where all the heavy lifting occurs in a typical job such as this one.
What went home.
Each photo was rendered here before sending any of it home on new media. The card was beyond repair. The pictures on it were not.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
More jobs off camera cards.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Published prices are fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. Any stand-alone drive is £300 + VAT. Drive configurations containing multiple disks (RAID, NAS or server) start at £500 + VAT. First assessments are always complimentary. Thereafter, data recovery charges are also fixed in advance and in writing, so you'll always know how much you owe before paying any money. Shut it down, get a quote first (by phone or with the form), then send it in or drop it off at our Guildford intake laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed). On most jobs you only pay if we recover your data.