A De Montfort student had a dissertation, its figures and about eighteen months of reading notes on a USB stick, with a submission date four days away and a draft on the university system that was three weeks behind. The stick was in a laptop in a rucksack when the rucksack went down on a hard floor. The metal plug is now bent over at an angle and the stick does nothing in any machine. This is the enquiry that arrives at eleven at night, and it arrived at eleven at night.
| Media | A USB flash drive whose connector was bent over while plugged into a laptop. It is no longer recognised on any machine and holds the only current copy of a dissertation due within the week. |
| What was reported | USB stick, damaged while plugged in when a bag was dropped, connector bent over, not recognised on any computer, dissertation and research notes on it, submission four days away. |
| Fault class | Physical damage where the connector meets the board. The plug had been levered sideways, lifting two of the four pads and cracking a track. The memory itself, which is the part that holds anything, was undamaged. |
| On the bench | Examined under a stereo microscope with the connector, the pads, the board and the memory package all assessed before anything was touched; the bent connector removed rather than straightened, the lifted pads bridged with fine wire and the cracked track linked; the memory read through its own controller once the connection was restored, which keeps the original arrangement intact and avoids a chip lift; imaged read-only; the filesystem parsed in R-Studio, the documents opened in the software that made them and written to fresh media. |
A stick plugged into a laptop is a lever with a heavy weight on the end. The connector is soldered to a small board by four pads and a pair of shield tabs, and it is designed to be pushed and pulled straight, not bent. Any sideways force ends up concentrated on those pads. That is the whole fault here, and it is by a distance the most common way a stick dies.
The memory is a chip the size of a fingernail and it survives most things. Flash memory has nothing moving in it and is far more robust than the plastic and the plug around it. A stick can be snapped in half, driven over or put through a wash and still have perfectly readable memory, because what fails is the mechanical connection and not the storage.
Repairing the connection beats lifting the chip when the board allows it. With the connector rebuilt, the stick's own controller does the addressing and the error correction and hands back a normal filesystem. Lifting the memory off gives raw pages that have to be descrambled and reassembled, which is slower and less complete. It is the right answer when the board is beyond repair and the wrong one when it is not, and the difference is established under a microscope rather than assumed.
Some sticks have no separate chip to lift at all. A large share of cheap ones are built as a single moulded block with the controller and the memory in one package, and on those the only route is a set of test pads under the resin, which is delicate, slow and not always successful. It is worth knowing before a stick is bought as the only home for anything, and it is another argument for a second copy on something else.
It was examined before it was powered, because a stick with a bent connector can short its supply against ground and the one thing nobody could afford here was a dead controller. Two pads had lifted and one track was cracked; the memory package and the controller were intact and the board was otherwise undamaged.
The bent connector was removed rather than bent back, since metal that has been folded once folds again in the same place. The pads were bridged with fine wire under the microscope, the cracked track linked, and a lead fitted directly. The stick then enumerated normally, was imaged read-only, and R-Studio parsed the volume out of the image. The dissertation was opened in the software that wrote it and the figures checked one by one before anything was called finished.
The dissertation came back, along with the figures, the notes and a folder of scanned articles. It went out on the published timetable rather than as a favour, which still landed inside the deadline: the examination closes two working days after a device is booked in and a finished single-device recovery leaves two to four working days after that.
Sticks and cards are £250 + VAT. Soldering on a board is electronic work and the published exclusion names it, so 50% of the figure was payable before the work began and the rest once the document had been opened. The stick did not go back into service, and neither should any stick that has had this done to it.
Do not straighten it and do not plug it in again. Bending metal back weakens it in exactly the place it already failed, and a stick with lifted pads can short across the supply the moment it makes contact, which is the one thing that can destroy the controller and turn a routine repair into a chip-level job. If the plug has come off entirely, keep it. Send the pieces together in something rigid, with a note saying what happened and when it is needed by. Above all, if a deadline is involved, say so at the enquiry rather than in a covering note, because the timetable is fixed and published and there is no point in discovering on day three that it does not fit. Then find the last copy you emailed anybody, however old, because having something to fall back on changes how the week feels.
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 card has nothing moving inside it, so a fall damages the way in rather than the contents
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.