USB Stick Repair in Leeds
Snapped the connector off your USB stick? Is your camera saying "SD Card Error"? Don't throw your memories away. We perform advanced micro-soldering recovery right here in Headingley to rescue data from damaged flash storage devices.
We Fix Physically Broken Drives
It happens easily. You knock the USB stick while it's in the laptop, and snap! The connector bends or breaks off. Most shops will tell you it's impossible to fix.
We love proving them wrong. Under our digital microscopes, we can see the tiny hair-thin wires that have broken. We solder temporary bypass wires to reconnect the memory chip to the controller, giving us just enough time to copy your data to safety.
We recover wedding photos for photographers in Leeds and dissertations for students who forgot to backup.
Devices We Handle
1. USB Thumb Drives
SanDisk, Kingston, Corsair. We fix bent connectors, blown fuses, and "Controller Corruption" (where the drive shows as 0MB).
2. SD & MicroSD Cards
From DSLRs to GoPros. If your card says "Write Protected" or won't mount, we use "NAND Readers" to dump the raw memory and reconstruct the photos byte-by-byte.
3. CFexpress & XQD
Professional media used by videographers. These are actually mini-NVMe drives. We have the high-speed interface tools to recover 4K and 8K footage.
The "Monolith" Challenge
The hardest recovery in the world.
Modern MicroSD cards and tiny USBs are "Monoliths" – all the electronic components are encased in a single block of plastic. There is no circuit board to solder to.
We can do it. We carefully sand off the plastic coating to reveal the microscopic gold contacts hidden underneath (the "Pinout"). We then solder 16 tiny wires to these dots to suck the data out. It is painstaking work, but it works.
Fake Drive Warning
Bought a cheap 2TB USB on eBay?
- It's Fake: It's probably a 8GB chip hacked to look like 2TB.
- Data Overwrite: Once you fill the real 8GB, it deletes the beginning to write the end. Data loss is often permanent on fakes.
Flash Recovery FAQs
Leeds answers.
Can you fix a snapped USB?
Yes. If the memory chip itself isn't cracked, we can almost always recover the data by repairing the PCB traces.
My card says "Format Now". Should I?
NO! Formatting destroys the file system map. Bring it to us first. We can ignore the error and read the files directly.
How much?
Simple connector repairs are ~£90. Monolithic recovery (sanding and micro-soldering) is much harder and starts from £180.