Hello,

I've got a Lexar SD card with wedding photographs that errored before I was able to back them up. I sent it to R3 Data Recovery who have said because it has 2 BGA NAND chips they are unable to recover any data from it. I don't doubt them at all but I was wondering if anyone knows of a company that may be able to recover the data or is all hope lost?

many thanks,

Daniel

Strange, it is very typical card and very common. We recover few same cases per week. Can you show me photo of card?

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Flash Killer - everyday new resources (pinout, XOR, ECC,config) for flash devices

Are you sure there wasn't any attribute of the chips that made then not able to recover? Maybe the not being able to recover is not related to it being BGA. As Arvika says, BGA and multiple BGA are very common and only difference is you use a different adapter to read chip.

pcimage is in the UK and I am sure would be able to handle this. http://www.pcimage.co.uk/

It's this SD Card: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexar-Professi ... l+sd+32+gb

The card itself is still with R3 but i'm asking them to ship it back in the next day or two.

The following was what they said:-


"...two BGA NAND chips on the PCB not one"

"It is not good news so far, the engineers have said they need to perform a NAND read on the two BGA chips, this is not a guarantee it is recoverable and relies on both NAND chips being readable and that we can emulate the controller to reassemble the data"

...

"I have heard from the engineers that unfortunately we have been unsuccessful in the recovery. Due to the type of device with the 2 BGA NAND chips and how new the device is the solution to this failure is not yet available and could take months to solve through research and development.

I am sorry it is not the news we were hoping for. I would suggest us sending the device back to you as a recovery should be possible in the future, we just don’t know when."

Does this help at all?

many thanks for the replies already!

Daniel

It's this card: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexar-Professi ... l+sd+32+gb

The card itself is still with R3 but will be back in a couple of days. The responses they gave me were:-

"It is not good news so far, the engineers have said they need to perform a NAND read on the two BGA chips, this is not a guarantee it is recoverable and relies on both NAND chips being readable and that we can emulate the controller to reassemble the data."

...

"I have heard from the engineers that unfortunately we have been unsuccessful in the recovery. Due to the type of device with the 2 BGA NAND chips and how new the device is the solution to this failure is not yet available and could take months to solve through research and development.

I am sorry it is not the news we were hoping for. I would suggest us sending the device back to you as a recovery should be possible in the future, we just don’t know when."

Also thanks i've contacted pcimage with the information!

many thanks,

Daniel

OK, so it looks like they don't use, or know how to use VNR, and/or the solution isn't in PC3K/FE... and they either don't have the time or engineers to research it for a solution.. Which can take the timeframe they say.

What they are saying is probably true, and really I must give kudos to them for being more honest than most would. Others might make up something saying it is simply unrecoverable, or faulty or whatever.

Wording matters.. and from the answer it is still not clear if they read or attempted to read the NANDs, or simply looked at solutions in tool databases for this controller and did not see a match.

The important pics needed is the PCB, and info on controller number and NAND chips part number (or NAND ID)

Once device chips are read, there can be many variables that contribute to the recovery.. but at this stage there is no reason to assume it is not recoverable.

There is this card usually: http://www.flash-extractor.com/library/ ... 0SD/SD_61/

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Flash Killer - everyday new resources (pinout, XOR, ECC,config) for flash devices

The final comment from R3 is:-

"The nand is new high capacity fast device and is multi voltage, the hardware to read this chip is still in development. Which basically means not enough of them have failed in order for recovery hardware to catch up with the new device technology."

Does this shed anymore light?

Thanks for the replies, i'm having it sent to pcimage to look at and crossing my fingers they can do something with it.

thanks,

Daniel

Some nand need different voltage. It is easy to set with proper tools.

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Flash Killer - everyday new resources (pinout, XOR, ECC,config) for flash devices

Labs that deal with flash are always playing catchup. It isn't a measure of how "good" or professional or whatever, but just how much time they dedicate to flash (and money), but also what comes in the lab to be able to gain experience in that devices make-up
It is altogether possible once we see what the NAND is, we say "oh.. hmm.. yes haven't seen one of those in my lab yet and yes.. I need to get up to speed on it.

Also possible it is new to them, but not us. once we have confirmation on the exact device part it will be easier to say.
The other thing to consider is many labs don't know exactly where the state of play is for many chips, so one great lab may not be able to recover, but another average lab, with a different tool may be. It is a sliding scale made up of sliding scales.

The differing voltages is a relatively new development that is becoming more common, it has always been there, even going back to the MCP chips of older cellphones, but we are seeing it a bit more lately and even on TSOP chips

Thanks for the information everyone, reassured that there's still hope to retrieve the data! the card should be with pcimage today so we'll see what they make of it and fingers crossed they can get it back, if not I may be back on here to see if there's anywhere else you recommend to try

I will not be using Lexar SD cards ever again that's for sure!

+1 ,
He Has Been Using And Playing With Some of The Pro Level Tools when We Were in Our Nappies .I am Sure Pcimage ,Arvika And Haque Can Solve It and Also Can a Few More i Know

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

The card has been received today and it has 2x BGA132 chips.

They do indeed have “dual voltage”.... 3.3v for VCC and 1.8v for VCCQ (I/O port). Without the correct voltage settings, the chips would not even ID.

We have successfully read the chips (with assistance from Chris at Rusolut to make the NAND reading configuration quickly) and have imported the dumps into FE for my quickness of reconstruction (I am more familiar with FE, but have no doubt that VNR could assemble it just as well).

Photos (raw Canon CR2) are being extracted as we speak

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Great work Sean

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

This is where collaboration makes a huge difference. Some labs are just too proud to seek advice from their peers.

This reminds me, I still owe PCImage and Arvika for a couple cases they each helped me with.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Flash could take a leap forward if people shared a bit more. But.. hang onto those pinouts, better to have a customer throw away their device and whatever was important to them that was on it than have your competitor make a few bucks.

It is getting a bit better though, There are quite a few people on here that still are proud to help customers recover data even if it isn't their own customer.

Personally I think in the next few years we are going to need all the help and resources we can get as things are moving at an alarming pace. It is only going to take 1 tricky ASIC to pretty much halt DR on a drive. Storage space for recoveries is already getting ridiculous

PC Image Data Recovery is the place to go, safe, secure and professional assistance in all the steps needed to secure your data.

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

yes, scroll up a bit and you will see you are 100% correct

Have had a few Lexar devices (some SD Cards, some flash drives) all with a variety of chip connections (even within the same line of product, just different capacity) and different voltage readings.

Lexar is perhaps the most non-standardized pain-in-the-neck flash device manufacturer. And I mean non-standardized within their own standard manufacturing plans. So strange...

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

They are a Micron company, and often been said they use the non perfect silicon from Micron and use all the good materials they can separate to make devices. Lexar has a decent presence in Data Recovery jobs but I think it is more the sheer volume of flash devices they manufacture than any difference in quality. But whenever you see a Lexar, you aren't going to know what layouts/structures etc until you dive in. But even that isn't too much different than anything else. Flash as a whole is a crap-shoot
A lot of Lexar flash is rebranded Micron and I've seen many with the Lexar numbers lasered directly on to of Micron numbers