Anyone know anyone who does hardware data recovery from MicroSD cards?

A friend has some data on a dead MicroSD card - it’s not seen by the operating system at all (tried on a range of machines/readers), so likely a hardware failure

So he’s looking for a reliable person/company to recover this data, possibly by physically accessing the NAND chip

Any recommendations?

(R-Studio comes up with nothing BTW)

There might be a possibility to recover the data via SPI mode if the MMC mode is damaged, the problem is that usually SDCard are one-package jobs so accessing the NAND directly could be complicated, could be as easy as just solder to some test point or plain impossible if no test pads are exposed.

Do you know how they died? Water or mechaincal damage?

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Card looks pristine, no outward signs of damage, and apparently didn’t get wet

How do I access via serial interface? An MCU with a microSD slot?

Yes, an arduino with an sdcard shell should be able to interrogate the card via SPI and see if it still alive

If is not answering to the comands it’s dead.

I have to tell you, a card that dies like that smell of cheap fake card…

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