Introduction #
A family member reached out to me after they damaged a flash drive and received a very expensive quote for recovering the data. While I don’t know exactly how they damaged the drive, it appears to have been a shear force that physically separated the enshrouded USB Type A connector from the rest of the drive.
Inspection #
Dumping out the envelope, the drive was in two pieces, with one of the USB contacts still attached to the main body (i.e. ripped out from the connector). The shroud connections are clearly mangled as well.
Repair #
The initial part of the repair is to use a metal spudger to separate the two halves of the plastic enclosure. Once this is done, the PCBA is revealed.
The PCBA is held into the sliding tray mechanism with a few plastic clips around the edges. It is easy to use fingers to remove the PCBA fully from the assembly. Once this is done, the PCBA can be flipped over and the USB connector pads inspected.
As you can see, the Data- pad is entirely missing from the PCB. To recover the data, solder mask will have to be scraped away to expose additional copper that can be soldered to. I chose the via since it has a more condensed copper area that should be a little easier and more robust than the trace. Using a utility or exacto knife to do this, I was then able to solder an old USB cable to the pads.
With these wires in place, the only remaining tasks were to confirm that there were no shorts present between the signals on the USB Type A connector, and plug in the drive. The drive powered up immediately and around ~19 GB of data was able to be recovered, for less than $10 (a replacement drive being $6 on Amazon in a 5-pack, a scrap USB cable, and some solder).
