| Device | Flash drive |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | SanDisk |
| Model | Ultra USB 3.0 |
| Capacity | 128 GB |
| Interface | USB 3.0 |
| Outcome | Partial recovery |
Serial numbers and any customer-identifying details are deliberately omitted.
What came in
Checked in as physical damage after a drop. Before it reached us, the drive had already been to another recovery company, which attempted micro-soldering on the board and damaged it in the process. What arrived was no longer a simple drop case.
What we found
Board damage from the prior repair attempt, on top of the original drop. We confirmed the original controller (marked 20-82-00709-B0) was damaged and no longer functional. The NAND itself was also damaged, showing extensive ECC errors — and those errors in turn corrupted the XOR information needed to reconstruct the data.
What we did
We first attempted chip-off with a virtual controller, but it did not yield usable results: between the extensive ECC errors and the limited amount of data actually written to the device, there was not enough to solve against. So we went the physical route instead — cleaned all of the connection points, migrated a donor controller onto a donor board, and moved the original NAND chip across. With temperature management applied during reading to keep the device stable, it now identifies in PC-3000 Portable Pro, though it still reads with extensive errors. From there we take a full image and run the logical extraction from the image rather than the drive.
Outcome
Partial recovery.
The extensive ECC errors and bad blocks across the NAND meant a portion of the data could not be reconstructed — that is what puts this in the partial column rather than a full recovery. This arrived as a straightforward dropped-drive case. The prior company's improper micro-soldering turned it into a much more complicated recovery with extensive memory failures, and materially reduced the odds of a good outcome. It is the clearest example we can point to of why the first attempt matters: we were not recovering a dropped flash drive, we were recovering a dropped flash drive plus somebody else's repair.
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