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I have sent my dead microSD card to a data recovery company, but it could not help me. The following is the diagnosis by the company. Can the existing technology help rescue my data?

Unfortunately, it is not possible to rescue the data from your order. We assumed the controller on your memory card is damaged. In these cases, we try to read the raw data out from the masked wiring from the back side of the card (see the photo from the back side of your card in the attachment), but it failed. That circumstance makes the data rescue no longer possible. The following causes for the failure of the storage medium come into question: a) A short-term voltage peak occurred from a connected device destroyed an electronic module in the memory device b) A previous production damage in the device, which has deteriorated by the continuous heating and cooling during the use and eventually lead to failure. c) A neutron, originating from cosmic rays, encountered an electronic device and destroyed them d) An alpha particle, emitted by radioactive contamination of the storage medium materials, has struck an electronic component and destroyed them.

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    Looks like the professionals gave their opinion.
    – Eugene Sh.
    Feb 4, 2015 at 20:20
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    The best advice I could give is give up and use 'C' as the reason it failed. If you're going to lose data it may as well be due to a cool reason.
    – Samuel
    Feb 4, 2015 at 20:26
  • Chances are reasonable that some data could be recovered by some means, but you can expect the cost and required tools and/or skill level to increase exponentially with the difficulty. If you have $50M worth of Bitcoins on there there is probably a way.
    – Spehro Pefhany
    Feb 4, 2015 at 21:06
  • Try downloading "Recuva" for Windows. I've recovered many damaged SD cards that way. It's free so no harm in trying.
    – cbmeeks
    Feb 4, 2015 at 21:09
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    @cbmeeks Complete waste of time. If you can't get at the data by bypassing the controller, a simple software solution would have not a hope. Two lessons learned, though... 1) never keep anything important on an SD card & 2) Any data stored in less than three distinct locations ought to be considered temporary.
    – Tetsujin
    Feb 5, 2015 at 8:49

1 Answer 1

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To translate into plain English:

A flash storage device (thumb drive, SSD drive, MicroSD card, etc.) consists of two parts: one or more storage chips, and a controller chip to coordinate things. Most of the time, when a drive fails, it's because of a problem with the controller chip: the data is still sitting there, but can't be accessed through normal means.

What the data recovery company did was open up the drive and bypass the controller chip, accessing the storage chips directly. When they did this, they were unable to get any data from them. Of the possible causes they listed, the likely ones are a voltage spike (static electricity can damage the chips, rendering them partly or completely unreadable), or hot/cold cycles causing either wires within the chips or the chips themselves to break. Cosmic rays and alpha particles usually cause problems with RAM, not flash, and the problems are temporary.

Data recovery may still be possible on a theoretical level, but it's going to cost far, far more. Instead of spending a few hundred dollars for a data recovery company, you'll be spending a few hundred thousand dollars or more for a university-level laboratory to disassemble the chips and read the memory cells directly -- and there's still no certainty that you'll recover anything.

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