Does anyone know of a TRUSTWORTHY repair/recovery service for USB flash drives? One that can replace a USB controller chip gone bad? And won't cost $2,000.00..? I found a few on Google, but I'm not trusting my drive to someone just because they have a web page.

I have a 32gb thumb drive that suddenly stopped working while attached to a laptop in a high-RF environment (FM transmitter site) and I can't get anything to recognize this bugger now. My life isn't gonna stop without it, but I put some work into making it bootable and with various utilities, and I don't have a recent backup. =-/

I tried the ChipGenius software, and even it couldn't detect the controller chip. I'm hoping the various transient/filter capacitors protected the flash chips and they are still viable. If so, transferring them to a new board might be able to retrieve the data. But I'm not set up to solder that small, and I don't want to waste time/money buying & cracking open random thumb drives hoping to find one with the UT165 & same flash chips - and possibly damaging/zapping them with my inexperience on chips that small.

Thanks.

If so, transferring them to a new board might be able to retrieve the data. But I'm not set up to solder that small, and I don't want to waste time/money buying & cracking open random thumb drives hoping to find one with the UT165 & same flash chips - and possibly damaging/zapping them with my inexperience on chips that small.

JFYI, the "standard" tool to recover from damaged USB sticks is something like this (example):

http://www.flash-extractor.com

The idea is to access the memory chip directly with "independent" hardware.

Maybe you could drop a couple of enquiry lines to those guys (or the makers or similar hardware) and ask for some names of their customers. (or ask on their forum):

http://flash-extractor.com/forum/index.php?c=2

jaclaz