A flash drive another lab called unrecoverable

What made it difficult

• The memory chip had already been removed and reattached by the other company, leaving heavy flux and heat damage.
• The circuit board was bent.
• Error rates were far beyond normal wear, and the errors changed from one read to the next.
• A raw chip read is not a copy of your files: the controller spreads data across the chip, scrambles it and keeps its own error correction, and all of that has to be undone.

What we did

1. Read the memory chip directly and corrected its errors.
2. Re-read every section again and again, keeping the best copy of each one.
3. Merged the best data from each pass into one clean image and rebuilt the files from it.
4. Kept the client updated throughout.