Do you think freezing the drive will do something? I heard it sometimes fixed temporarily hdd's.

Measure the NAND Vcc supply. If the 3.3V regulator is broken and the NAND is receiving 5V instead of 3.3V, that would explain the heating. A photo of the PCB would help immensely.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

On the big ones (probably going to the flash) I'm getting 3.24v. On the smaller caps I'm getting 1.8v (probably the controller). There are also 2 caps that im getting 5v on, but these are next to USB connector, so I think these might be to smooth out the voltages? Pictures are in attachments.

Those voltages seem OK.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

So now the question is, what to do now. Should i freeze it and imminently start cloning the drive?

As I see it, your bad sectors aren't generating read errors, so how would you know whether a particular dump is good?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

All i could do to see if particular dump is good when i would compare the .exe files (of which I've got a copy) to know good ones (like diskinfo32 from CDI). Scanning with HDTUNE gives me no bad blocks. As I remember, I was seeing some recovered corrupted files counter while recovering files, but forgot if this was on this drive or other drive.

Maybe you could glue a heatsink onto the NAND?

https://www.aabcooling.se/eng_pl_AABCOOLING-Ram-Heatsink-4-206_2.jpg

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The only heatsinks that would remotely fit would be mosfet coolers. Maybe I could put an silicon thermal pad and zip tie the flash to it?

Just sit the whole lot on top of a peltier cooler, it should be adequate there's no need for it to be anything fancy. I've even used a section of aluminium 1" bar to extend the cold surface in the past, thermal pads if you really want to but I wouldn't bother.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

I have a box full of assorted heatsinks which I've salvaged from all sorts of electronic devices. If something doesn't fit, I use a hacksaw to cut it to the correct size. I then attach a thermal pad which I cut to size from a sheet.

A Peltier cooler would be a better idea in this case.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Went through my collection of heatsinks and found one form an GPU. Attached a fan to with, placed a thermal pad on it, then attached it to the flash. I'll post the results after DMDE is done imaging the drive.

It seems like it changed something, but not enough to make it working. Comparing diskinfo32 cooled by compressor with the diskinfo32 (one with heatsink and fan), 00 becomes 40, 55 becomes 75, 56 becomes 16. All i can think of now is to either blast the heatsink with compressed air or freeze both the heatsink and flash drive. Any ideas?

I have written a tool to count the number of differences between two files. It runs in a CMD window. If you can compare one of your dumped files against a known good copy, this should tell you whether your "yield" is improving.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

This version also reports the number of bit differences (and the coding is a little less ugly).

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I don't think i have any other ideas than to freeze the drive then imminently start recovering or imaging it. Guess I'll freeze it and in the meantime prepare for the worst case scenario and start searching for the lost files on other PC's.

Thermal manipulation is one of or go to tools, either via freezing or heating when working with nand. Why not just hand this off to a professional, it's not going to cost you a lot for a 1GB usb stick.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

There's no point of paying someone to recover the files as I'd like to do this at home and I already found most of the files (there were some ziped drivers on it too, but DMDE didn't show them and I think I've got them on my driver hdd). Guess I could try now to make an partition on it now, although I'll try out different things and maybe that will let me recover the files. Anyways, any ideas what caused the drive to suddenly corrupt?

I have no idea as to what has could have caused it or why the internal error checking isn't throwing errors Im afraid. From the symptoms its difficult to determine if it's a problem with the nand, controller or even the board.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Went ahead and tried to format it. Not to my surprise I ended up with error that windows couldn't finish formatting it. Guess its broken beyond repair?