A sailing club at Rutland Water photographs its race days from the committee boat and prints the results afterwards on a laptop in the clubhouse. The laptop went off the end of a trestle table with the card still in the slot, landing on the corner where the slot is. The machine survived. The card came out visibly bent along one edge and has not been read by anything since, in the clubhouse or at home. A full season of racing was on it and none of it had been copied off.
| Media | An SD card that was seated in a laptop's card slot when the machine fell, taking the impact through the exposed edge of the card. No reader will now acknowledge it. |
| What was reported | SD card, in a laptop when it was dropped onto a hard floor, bent along one edge, no longer read by any card reader, a season of race photography on it and no copy anywhere. |
| Fault class | Physical damage to the card body and its contact pads. The memory itself was undamaged, which is the usual outcome, because the part of a card that stores anything occupies a small area of it and has no moving components to be knocked out of position. |
| On the bench | Examined under a stereo microscope, with the contact face, the body and the position of the internal die all mapped before anything was attempted; the memory read at chip level, the die lifted under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer once the contacts were confirmed unusable; the raw pages descrambled and error correction applied; the pictures carved by content signature in PhotoRec, checked by opening rather than by counting, and written to fresh media. |
A card in a slot is a lever, and levers concentrate everything at one point. Half the card is inside the machine and half is not, so a fall onto that edge puts the whole weight of the laptop through the plastic where the two halves meet. The body cracks, the contact pads shear away from the traces behind them, and the reader has nothing left to make contact with. That is a broken way in, not a broken memory.
Nothing inside a card moves, which is why the odds here are good. A hard disk has a spinning platter and an arm that can be thrown out of position by an impact. A memory card has neither. Its contents live in a die a few millimetres across, potted in resin somewhere under the label, and an impact that destroys the shell around it usually leaves it electrically intact. The one genuine limit is a crack running through the die itself, and that is visible before any work is quoted.
Forcing it into readers is the mistake to avoid at this point. A bent card in a slot can short a pad against its neighbour, and a reader will happily supply enough current for that to matter. Every attempt also risks snapping a partially broken card into two properly separate pieces, which does not make the memory unreadable but does make the work longer. It arrived after two attempts, which was two more than ideal and not enough to have cost anything.
Reading a chip on its own is not the same as reading a card. Once the die is off the board, what comes out is raw pages in the order the controller chose to write them, with error-correction data mixed in and the whole lot scrambled by a pattern that varies between manufacturers. Turning that back into a filesystem is a reconstruction, and it is why chip-level work is priced and treated as physical work rather than as a scan.
Under magnification the damage was as expected from the description: the body cracked across, two contact pads lifted clean off their traces, and the die visible through the fracture with no crack running into it. There was no realistic route through the contacts, so the die was lifted under hot air, cleaned and read on a programmer.
The raw read was descrambled and the error correction applied, which turned a great deal of noise into a readable image. Almost none of the original directory survived the fracture, so the photographs were carved by content signature in PhotoRec and then checked by opening them: the raw files were opened in full, the timestamps compared against the club's race calendar, and the handful of truncated images separated out and returned as such rather than mixed in with the rest.
The season came back, including the two open meetings the club had already advertised as printed. Around thirty pictures were incomplete, all of them from the last few minutes of shooting before the fall, and those went back in a separate folder with a note saying why. The card did not go home, because there was nothing left of it to go home.
Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT. Lifting a die off a board is chip-level work, which the published exclusion names, so 50% of the figure was payable before the work started and the balance only once the pictures had been looked at.
Put it somewhere safe and stop trying it. A card whose pads have moved can short against a reader, and each attempt is another chance to break a cracked body properly in half. Do not attempt to straighten it, do not clean the contacts with anything abrasive, and do not tape it back together, since adhesive on the contact face makes a chip-level read harder rather than easier. Post it in a rigid case or between two pieces of stiff card in a padded envelope, not loose, because a card that arrives in two pieces is a longer job than one that arrives in one. Say in the covering note what fell, how far, and onto what, since the answer changes where the bench looks first.
Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.
A file that appears in a scan has not gone anywhere; the index that lists it has
A card that reads as empty has lost its list, not its contents
A format the trade stopped making needs equipment the trade stopped selling
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.