York's livelihood is based on being photographed: weddings at York Minster, tourists taking photos off the city walls, and race days out on the Knavesmire. A fair amount of it gets recorded onto memory cards which fail at the very worst time. SD, microSD, CF and CFexpress cards arrive here from working professionals and families alike, and the photos usually make the trip home again.
Every memory card job gets a free diagnosis. The quote comes back fixed and in writing before any tools are lifted.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Chip level, electronic and mechanical repair is charged at 50% at start-up, and the other 50% only upon successful recovery of your data; all BitLocker, ransomware, forensic and CCTV/DVR recoveries are charged at start-up when you accept our fixed quote. More information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first step for all memory cards, once they have been received, is to match the symptoms of what went wrong to one of the possible faults (there are 25). After twenty-odd years, this list covers almost every memory card that we receive in our lab.
Three devices (your camera, card reader and laptop) all point to a common cause: failure of either the controller or the firmware. Your photos remain safe in the NAND storage area behind the dead circuitry.
A damaged file table doesn't mean the pictures have gone. Saying yes to that format dialog is the one reliable way to make things worse, so don't agree to it. Get a quote first on 0800 689 0668 or with the free online diagnostic, then send the card.
The frames stay in the flash until new ones are written on top. Put the card away in a drawer and most of a deleted folder usually comes back.
Cameras only quick-format, which does little damage to your data. The shoot underneath generally remains intact and can be extracted from the card without harm.
Cards break when they bend in slots, wallets and cheap adapters. If the crack left the tracks inside the card intact, we access the chip directly and extract what we need.
This is the "emergency" mode of a card controller after a crash. From here the work is at chip level, and routine for us.
When a card controller starts to fail, it locks itself up. That looks identical to an SD lock slider that has been nudged. One is a simple 10-second fix, so we check the slider first, then the controller.
Memory cards can last a long time even when an accident occurs. We clean them; stabilise them; then test and read from the chip level (whatever happened).
A fake card folds new writes over one small genuine chip once it has filled up completely. All recordings made before the fold-over are recoverable.
Files are half-written and the file system stops with some words missing. Frames are then carved from the raw data instead of depending on the file system that has failed.
Flash is spent in about two years when using circular recording. Carving the remaining data blocks returns your video, and the portion you want to save will usually be there.
Ultras and Extremes die at the controller over healthy NAND more than any other pattern in our card log. Purely chip level. Very well practised.
The entire card is contained within one solid piece of material. Therefore we simply match its test points against our archive of pinouts, then talk to the memory directly.
Type B cards used in drone and mirrorless camera systems can fail hard when capturing at cinema bit rates: wedding films at the county's venues, survey passes along the coast. The cards use PCIe internally, therefore the NVMe side takes care of them.
Physical damage (bent or cracked) plus damage to write integrity (an interrupted write): both layers of damage. Worked in strictly that order, and it usually ends well.
An Extreme PRO microSD card that had been placed within a waterproof case all summer will age fast, with heat and repeated vibration bringing the read errors forward.
Kingston's budget line will freeze into a silent controller state. The NAND under it reads perfectly once you can get past the controller.
Socket pins bent, then an interface that shorts. At our end we read the card on a rebuilt socket rig without issue.
Samsung knock-offs corrupt when writes wrap around their actual capacity. Genuine frames are carved from the honest range; no one gets fooled by the label here.
Shooters with long continuous sequences will sometimes cause Lexar's Professional line to hang (or freeze) and then mess up the last portion of the shoot. It is rebuilt from a raw read of the card.
There was a power failure that occurred prior to an attempt to write the index into the file, so the file does not contain a moov atom, and therefore players cannot read it. We rebuild the moov atom from the stream data within the file.
Corruption of the wear table produces a card which mounts as if populated but is actually all zeros. Still present in the flash however is the real content waiting to be remapped.
A cold dry day; the card was handed back & forth (hand to hand) many times; the controller took the spark. Invisible and instant, but repairable at chip level.
These no-name card readers over-volt your cards and drop them mid-write through an unstable connection. The card pays the price; a chip-level read settles the account.
When a card is formatted as internal storage, the data is encrypted to that specific handset. Therefore, without access to the working phone, the data stored on the card cannot be decrypted. That's about it. We do not work on phones.
A memory card is a sliver of NAND with a small controller, boxed in plastic: no shock mounting, no redundancy, no spare anything. A proper memory card recovery service images the whole card before touching a single file, so the original never takes a second hit. That first sector-level copy is also why DIY attempts that went wrong elsewhere can often still be rescued here. SD in every speed class, microSD from dashcams and drones, CompactFlash from older camera bodies, XQD and CFexpress from current pro kit: the routine stays the same.
Broken cards are sent to the chip bench. A microSD is monolithic (memory, controller and contacts all sealed as one piece of silicon), so the route in runs through its test points: probe the memory, take a raw dump, then rebuild that dump into photographs and clips a computer can open. Whether the snap spared the internal tracks is the question to be answered by the free assessment before money gets discussed. An SD card data recovery service cannot promise every break; it can promise you will know your odds before spending a penny.
Working on cards is micro-surgical over bare flash, done using the same specialist rigs used for sticks & single slab devices:
Rebuilding the dead controller’s arithmetic in software after reading the NAND itself. This is how conversation resumes with a stick or card that answers nothing.
Hot-air and IR profiles are tuned so a memory package leaves its ruined board without the stored charge leaving along with it. Temperature discipline is the entire trick.
Where there is no chip to lift, we identify test points on our archived pinouts and wire them out by hand under a high-powered magnifier. This process can take time, however it is very accurate and very effective.
The XOR, ECC and wear-levelling puzzle is worked until a raw dump reads as named folders again. Dull maths, but a nice ending.
In many cases "dead" sticks are simply lifted pads, torn tracks and/or sheared plug connectors that can be repaired by rebuilding them under the scope.
All cards and sticks are read through a write-blocked interface. Therefore the original flash travels back to you unchanged, because that is the whole idea.
Mostly Extreme PRO stock and the Ultra SDSQUAB rule the tray. They usually arrive with a controller that has failed over perfectly good NAND. CFexpress Type B is the growth trade. Wedding photographers shooting at venues around Yorkshire and drone pilots doing coastal work push those cards to the limit, and at cinema bit rates they fail without warning. A separate word of warning for dashcam cards: looping simply wears flash out, and that footage comes back by carving whichever blocks held on. Counterfeits round off the regulars, corrupting at the point where writes wrap past their true capacity.
Get a quote first, by calling us on 0800 689 0668 or using our free online diagnostic tool. After receiving your quote, tracked and insured post is how nearly every job reaches us: it is the fastest and safest way to get your drive to our lab in Leeds. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send, or you can hand it in at the Leeds lab's reception.
Is the hard drive or SSD still inside a machine, such as a laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR system or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from the machine first and then post just the bare drive by itself; we do not provide a service for removing drives from devices. For a server or RAID, send every disk, each clearly marked with its bay. For a NAS, send its disks labelled by bay if you can remove them, otherwise send the NAS itself. We cannot work on storage soldered to the motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, T2 Macs and certain slim laptops): if it doesn't come out, it can't come in. If you are unsure whether your storage is removable, call us before sending.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Once you have your quote, send your package addressed to Leeds Data Recovery (about a 40 minute drive from York on the A64 & A1(M) or next working day if you want to send it using trackable post). We will contact you as soon as we have taken delivery of your package and put it in line to be worked upon.
Can't figure out what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or try our free online diagnostic tool.
Free diagnosis, fixed written quote, and on most work you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or call our freephone.