A wedding on an SD card. A drone flight on microSD. A photographer’s month on CompactFlash. Cards fail from corruption, snapped shells and worn flash — and this lab’s heritage runs deep here: among the first in the UK to read memory-card chips directly when the card around them has died. Free diagnostic, fixed quote.
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Corruption leads: the camera says ‘card error’, the computer demands a format, the folder shows fragments. Causes range from interrupted writes (battery died mid-shot, card yanked early) to counterfeit cards whose real capacity ran out beneath their claimed one. Physical failure is blunter: snapped microSDs, cracked full-size shells, cards that no reader anywhere acknowledges. And wear stalks heavily-reused cards — dashcams and CCTV cycles especially — as flash cells exhaust their rewrite budget. The first two rules are universal: stop shooting on it (new photos overwrite lost ones), and decline every format prompt.
Most cards are a ‘monolith’ — controller and NAND fused in one sliver of resin. When the card electronics die or the shell snaps, the flash inside frequently survives, and the recovery route is direct: expose the chip’s test points, read the raw NAND, then rebuild the data from it — undoing the controller’s scrambling (wear-levelling, interleave, ECC) mathematically. It’s painstaking, it’s specialist, and it’s been part of this lab’s toolkit longer than almost anyone’s in the UK. If a shop has told you a broken card is hopeless, that’s a second-opinion case, not a verdict.
Usually not: card errors are mostly corruption over intact photos. Stop using the card immediately — every new shot can overwrite an old one — and decline any format offer. Logical card recoveries are among the quickest jobs on the bench.
Surprisingly often, no. The flash chip inside a monolith card can survive a snapped shell, and chip-level reading recovers data directly from the NAND. It depends where the break ran — through the resin or through the die — and the free diagnostic answers that honestly.
Frequently, yes — worn cards fail progressively, and imaging rescues what the weakening cells still hold. Loop-recording means the oldest footage is genuinely overwritten, so be realistic about the window; for recorder hard drives rather than cards, see the CCTV/DVR service page.
A free diagnostic first, always — then a fixed written quote before any work begins. No surprises on the invoice, because there's no invoice until you've approved the number.
A representative selection of related work from the bench.
Getting a device onto this bench only takes two moves, and the clock on your free look starts the moment it lands.
Strip out cables, caddies and power bricks — none of it helps — wrap the device so it can't shift in transit, and either post it insured to 83 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 2ER or bring it in yourself. Tuck a note of what happened in with it, and enclose the shipping form if you've printed one.
Arrival gets confirmed, the diagnostic runs at no cost to you, and the call that follows names the fault and states a fixed price. The bench stays idle on your device until you say go.
£250 + VAT fixed, free diagnostic first. Every recovered image verified individually before it goes back to you.