Got this one from a customer who somehow managed to bend/crack the connector, making the drive unusable. After taking out the PCB from the casing and looked on it in the microscope I found that the Vcc-track was the only thing that actually broke. A small solder bridge over the crack and the pendrive was a happy camper again, giving us all the data.

However, I must say that the plastic casing for this pendrive was horrible. Since it slids in and out you'd imagine that it was easy pickings using small pliers, cracking and plucking the internal plastic locks. Right?

Wrong. I had to add a considerable amount of force to make the internal slider come loose, and this was only after I had actually cut the outer plastic casing. At the same time I was not allowed to use unlimited force because then I would have damaged the PCB even more, making it a 5+ hour recovery. Despite the tough plastic and big challenge I finally managed to pull the PCB and connect it to a USB-port for extraction.

Only to find out that the plastic casing double acted like a connector shell for the ultra tiny PCB, which itself did not fit in a female connector.

At this point I said "F* it", slaughtered a scavenged USB-cable from the junk box, soldered its connectors to the board and then called it a day.

In case anyone missed it: from now on I hate Cruzer

I take anything like that over the stupid monolithic ones that are both wedged with plastic grips and glued inside a metal casing any day.

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

Oh, yeah. 100% agree; the glued-in-metal-casing ones are way worse.

They have a massive variety of different designs of cases and PCB/chips/controllers making it difficult to assume anything on these. for the push ones, they have wings that spring out to lock the slider in. I drill a small hole in both sides and push the retaining wings in and it slides out. or sometimes just whittle the sides down with box cutter until it comes apart. patience and no force is key!