Memory card recovery
USB sticks SD photo cards Compact flash XD Cards Transflash CFast Sony SxS Sony MS
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Data recovery from memory cards
Data recovery from all types of memory card. From USB memory sticks, photo cards including Sony XQD, CFast professional memory cards, from USB sticks, key drives, photo cards, SD cards, compact flash cards and all other types of memory card.
Chip off data recovery
When it comes to chip-off data recovery, we use the most advanced equipment available to ensure that the best chance of recovering your data.
By directly reading the memory chips and rebuilding the data structures stored on removable memory cards gives the best chance of recovery on dead memory cards.
The most common chips used are based on NAND technology. We currently use the three market leaders for NAND flash memory chip reading, as this enables us to support the maximum number of devices.
PC3000 Flash Reader
The PC3000 Flash is one of the most useful tools for recovering data directly from FLASH memory chips. With advanced features and an automatic mode, it can make a difficult process simple.
There is a massive database for existing devices, including NAND chips and many types of processors. If you have a tech support contract, an Ace Lab engineer will log in to your computer to help with the more difficult cases.
It comes with 48 pin TSOP, TLGA, and BGA adapters, along with the circuit board adapters as standard and there are other adapters available for other chips including the 'Spider' tool for working on Monolithic memory devices.
A massive database of devices and NAND types is built in, and another online database developed by Acelab and users that want to share information is available to those with the support contract.
Acelab have been supplying advanced data recovery equipment for hard drives, SSD, and Flash, for at least 20 years. They also offer a range of courses for beginner to advanced, and shows how to use their equipment to get the best from it.
Rusolut Reader
The Rusolut is the latest tool to come to the market and is marketed at data recovery companies. It uses a concept based around the VNR software that comes with the tool. It is a modular system where the various stages to read and rebuild the data content is built up as a visual object. The software has a lot of other advanced features, like viewing the content as a bitmap image. This helps to identify XOR patterns and can show anomalies in blocks, such as identifying bad blocks and noise within the image. Which can then be used to modify read voltages and other parameters to get a clean read of the device under test. A very advanced tool, Rusolut know this and offer training packages on using the tool and software.
It has a growing user base and a large database of existing NAND devices and processor types, so can be used straight out of the box. There is also a growing online database of new devices where parameters can be downloaded for use.
Soft Center Flash Reader
The Soft Center flash reader and flash extractor have been around since the early 2000s. We started using this when the software was DOS-based, but has now developed into a full-blown Windows product that is capable of recovering a lot of NAND-based memory devices.
It, too, uses a visual representation of reconstructing data. The software is very advanced and has a steep learning curve. There is an online manual to help you get started.
There are regular database updates for the tool, but Soft Center do not run training courses on using it, so it is a real hands-on approach to get the best from it.
We then look at removing the memory chips and reading them using one of the readers list above. This creates an image file of the dump, but this is just the start of the process.
Each dump has to be tested for bad blocks and error correction. Once this is complete, it then moves on to the block reassembly.
Each NAND device may consist of up to 8 crystals, or banks, each being a specific size to make up the total memory card size.
These blocks are not in order because of wear levelling, similar to that used in SSD drives. At the end of each block is a value indicating which bank, block number, its status, i.e. in use or not, etc. We then rebuild each memory bank, and then determine how the data is stored across the banks. Many of them could be considered to be as a RAID 0 across the blocks, banks, or even byte level.
Overall, it can be a very complex task to rebuild. Once everything is lined up, we are ready to copy the data.
We get several jobs from professional photographers for some 'unknown' reason, their card has failed either during or when post-processing the images.
The main reason is that they forget to power-off their cameras before removing the card. This can cause a power surge on the card, rendering it dead.
So always 'Eject' a USB stick and turn off the camera before removing memory cards.