How near to impossible is it to recover data from a broken flash drive?

S

scott g

New member
I have a (now broken) 4gb USB flash drive which has hundreds of hours of work stored on it! (yes, i understand about backing things up and how crucial it is, but It was just my personal work and I never saw a flash drive as being at any risk for failure... please no lectures)

I have been having problems with my motherboard so I had to buy a new one and I had time to install it today. After installation I couldn't get my thumb drive to work and I couldn't figure out why. When I went to unplug the device the USB plug and the entire casing was burning hot. I took it apart and have found one capacitor to be fried. When I plug the device into a usb port that capacitor gets extremely hot within seconds. I could CARE LESS about my computer and it's problems or even how the drive got fried. I'll figure that out later. My priority is the data on that drive.

I have emailed 2 shops in the area who I've gone to to recover data from hard disk drives, but those are quite different animals from a tiny little flash chip soldered to a dysfunctional circuit board. How much hope is there that there is an affordable way (to put a price to it, say under $1000) to recover the data on my flash drive?
 
Doesn't sound promising, but if the capacitor is big enough to identify and replace, you could try that first. I redid many caps on my monitor successfully, brought it back to life.
I've never seen an open flash drive though, dunno how tiny those are. They cost nickles and dimes.

Email me if you want a good capacitor seller, I can look at my receipt, but forget the name just now....
 
I have replaced the capacitors on motherboards successfully and the boards still work. If you apply that logic to your circuit board it may be possible to replace the bad capacitor on your thumb drive. Just because it didn't work does not mean the memory chip is fried. Of course there is a chance it's fried, but not a certainty.

I would wait and see what kind of response you get from the data recovery people. If they won't touch it contact some electronics shops and see what they say. As a last resort, I would get the numbers off the capacitor and get a new one. I have had good luck with mouser.com, but there are others that will accept small orders. You will need to brush up on your soldering skills, or have a professional do it, but you have nothing to lose if every other option is a dead end.

BTW, they say a flash memory chip is good for 10,000 reads/writes before it starts to fail. Good luck.

Edit: If you can buy an identical drive to the one that failed you would have the parts you need.
 
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