Data recovery USB flash drive / memory card

When flash-card or USB-Flash drive

What is better not to do when restoring information from Flash-drives:

1. Do not use repair-software to repair flash drives. Repair flash drives and data recovery – absolutely different processes.
2. If the drive is physically damaged, do not wait with the last hope “maybe it will turn on” to connect the drive in the computer.
3. For logical damage, for example, the destruction of file systems or the banal accidental deletion of the desired file, do not write anything to the drive!

Recovering flash media requires a special approach to each case, the use of unique equipment and knowledge.

The main principle when recovering data from any drive: DO NOT HARM!

Memory card faults

Relatively speaking, all problems with drives (not only based on NAND memory) can be divided into two large groups: Logical and Physical.

In the case of Flash-drives, the task of data recovery is significantly different from HDD, because when hardware damage, often to revive the drive does not make sense.

Logical recovery of flash-drives

With logical flash failures, the recovery process is very similar to the process of recovering data from hard disks: searching for the metadata of file systems, searching for the data itself and collecting the data found in a single whole.

The range of file systems for flash memory is narrowing: mostly FAT32, exFAT are used, occasionally there are FAT16 or NTFS. But the list of problems is incredibly wide: starting with a simple erasure of the file, ending with a variety of unsuccessful attempts to restore the data yourself. Also, one of the unpleasant features of Flash-drives is that hardware problems can look like logical ones.

There are three conditions that allow us to classify the problem of flash devices as logical:

1. The flash drive does not have any hardware damage;
2. A flash drive is detected in the system when connected to a PC;
3. The flash drive shows all the capacity declared by the manufacturer.

If any of these conditions is not met, then we can assert the problem as hardware.

Hardware damage of flash-drive

These flash memory corruption include problems that do not fall into the logical category. Often the flaws of the technology itself NAND – low durability. Internal controller algorithms simply can not correct bit errors and, often, simply initialize the controller firmware.

Next, for the popularity of flash drives problems are the problems of the controllers themselves and for them the board problems. In the controllers, the firmware or part of it is often spoiled. In the boards, the elements of the power circuit of the chip are burned or the connector is broken off (distributed on USB-drives).

Restoring data by reviving the drive is a direct way to destroying the data. When the controller malfunctions or memory chips need to unsolder the chip and read them in the dumps – binary copies of chips. The data is not stored as “as it is”, but has an organized structure of pages and sectors that are converted by the controller’s writing algorithms. The task: to repeat the algorithm of the controller or, in simple language, to eliminate the transformations.

Price. The cost of data recovery from flash-drives and flash-cards memory.

Free diagnostics! The payment will done only after receiving the data.