Case record · Memory cards · SDR-2025-0911
A Chipped Corner on the SD Card.
A Mother's Day weekend of family sessions, about five hours of shooting on there
, then a small accident and a very loud silence: a corner of the plastic snapped off next to the gold contacts
when the card jammed in a laptop slot, and no reader will look at it now
. The broken piece came out with it — a scrap of luck that mattered later.
Seeing the same thing yourself?
0800 6890668
The translation.
An SD card is mostly packaging. Inside it sits a monolithic die — controller and memory moulded into one package — with the gold contacts joined to it by traces running close to the card's edge. Break the shell beside those contacts and the traces frequently go with it, while the die comes through untouched. 'No reader will look at it' describes a doorway that has been smashed, not necessarily a room that is empty, and having the fragment showed us precisely where the crack had travelled.
Kit used on this job.
What happens in a case →| Platform | Its role in this case | Why we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor | Read the memory directly, correcting ECC and reordering pages | Rebuilds files from a raw NAND image: ECC, XOR, page transforms, reassembly |
| IR preheater & BGA rework station | Measured heat to open a route to the die without cooking what it held | Lifts memory chips off and reballs them without burning what they hold |
| PC-3000 Flash | Identified the chip against an up-to-date database before any read was attempted | Pulls data straight from memory chips, with a current library that identifies them automatically |
In the lab.
Chart the fracture before the card is touched
Under magnification, with the broken piece held back against the card, the damage could be traced: the crack had removed a slice of the contact block and the wiring immediately behind, then stopped short of the die. That one observation turned a bleak-looking job into an ordinary one.
Get to the memory around the broken edge
Rather than rebuilding shattered contacts, we probed the monolith's own test points to work out the pinout — every maker arranges them differently and no universal chart exists — and made a direct connection to the memory, sidestepping the damaged edge completely.
Turn raw memory back into photographs
The raw dump was then worked properly: error correction applied, page and block order resolved, and the filesystem built back on top. Contents pulled from NAND are not files until all that is done, which is why chip-level work is a separate trade from pushing a card into a reader.
The result.
Both sessions and the half-finished edit came back whole. Mother's Day landed on time, off a card that will never function again and did not need to.
Similar cases on the index.
Also filed under Memory cards.
Does this sound like your own drive?
The rule holds as in every case above: switch it off, and let a free diagnosis come before any decision.