One thing to know first
Not an emergency, but don't let anything try to fix it yet.
A device that is silent and cool is not degrading while it sits there, so there is no clock running on the hardware. The risk here is the next action rather than the passage of time: initialising the disk when prompted, letting a repair tool write a new partition table, or reformatting to make it usable will each overwrite the map to your files. Decline every offer to fix, repair or initialise until you know which fault you have.
Often fixable yourself
USB stick not showing up
A USB stick in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
The commonest fault on a USB stick is not electronic at all. The metal connector is soldered to a small circuit board with a handful of joints, and the leverage of a stick sitting in a laptop that gets moved is enough to crack them. A stick with a cracked joint reads intermittently, or reads when held at an angle, or has stopped entirely. Behind that connector the memory is usually untouched, which is why this is one of the better faults to have.
The commonest failure is physical: the connector is soldered to a thin board and snaps where the two meet, usually while plugged in.
Cable, port or enclosure faultbetter news
The single commonest cause, and entirely benign. The device behind the failed connection is untouched.
Partition table or boot sector damagebetter news
The drive is healthy and the files are all present, but the index that points to them is corrupt, so the operating system sees unallocated space.
Filesystem the operating system doesn't recognisebetter news
A drive formatted on a Mac, a Linux box, or a NAS will often appear unreadable or empty on Windows while being perfectly intact.
Controller or translation-layer failure
On flash media, the controller that maps files onto the memory has failed. The memory is intact but nothing can reach it without specialist work.
Degrading or failing media
The device is present but cannot complete the reads needed to identify itself. This is the case where time and power do matter.
What to check first on a USB stick
- Try it in another port and another computer first, to eliminate the obvious.
- With it plugged in, apply very gentle sideways pressure to the connector and watch whether the machine chimes or the drive briefly appears. Intermittent detection under light pressure is a cracked joint, not a dead memory chip.
- Look at the join between the metal connector and the plastic body for any visible gap or movement.
What not to do
Do not keep wiggling it once you have your answer, and do not leave it plugged in half-working while you copy files off. A partially connected stick can lose power mid-write, and a flash device interrupted during an internal housekeeping operation can corrupt its own mapping tables, which turns a soldering job into a chip-level one.
Try this before you pay anyone
Work through these before assuming the worst. Most cases end here
- Change the cable first. USB cables fail far more often than drives do, and a charge-only cable carries no data at all.
- Try every port, then a different computer. A drive that appears on another machine has a driver or port fault, not a data fault.
- Check whether the operating system can see the device even though the files aren't visible: Disk Management on Windows, Disk Utility on macOS, `lsblk` on Linux. A device listed there with no drive letter or mount point is intact and simply not mounted.
- If it is listed but shows as RAW or unallocated, stop and read the next line carefully.
If Windows offers to initialise the disk, or macOS offers to repair or erase it, say no every time. Those actions write to the very structures that describe where your files are. A drive showing as RAW usually still has everything on it, and that stays true only for as long as nothing writes to it.
How recoverable this is
The most optimistic group on this page taken as a whole. A large share are connection or filesystem faults where the data was never in danger, and a good number of those the reader resolves themselves in ten minutes at no cost. The cases that are genuinely media or controller failures are a different job, and the checks below separate them without risk.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether the device is detected at any level: BIOS, Disk Management, or not at all
- Whether anything has already written to it, including an initialise or a repair
- Whether the underlying media is healthy or degrading
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
USB sticks and memory cards
Cameras, dashcams, drones, phones. Includes carving for cards that no longer present a filesystem.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on a USB stick
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.