Recently, we received a case on Toshiba 16GB thumb drive. This customer was anxious because the thumb drive contains her semester assignment and friends photo, according to customer description, this thumb drive was being removed without safety reject for serval time, and one day when he inserts the thumb drive to the computer, the disk management cannot detect it anymore. This customer already approaches some of data recovery center, but none of them able to help her recover his data back, so, finally he found out that our data recovery center.

As usual, when our data recovery specialist first received this hard disk drive, he performs an entire scan of the thumb drive, makes sure there is damage on the thumb drive. After checking, he found out that everything was fine. Next, he decided to plug in the hard disk drive to the computer, he noticed that computer was not able to detect the thumb drive, and he suspects that there is a damage to the controller chip or the memory, so he decides to open out the cover for further diagnosis.

Upon opening, he disassembles the memory chip from the chip and inserted it into the EXT Controller to find out the memory ID and some of the information, also using the microscope tool to locate the controller chip ID. After finding out the information, our data recovery specialist using the data recovery tools to analysis the memory chip and found out the service area for the memory chip is 1218. After finding out the service area, he needs to use XOR Gate to decrypt the data, so what is XOR Gate, An XOR gate implements an exclusive or; that is, a true output result if one, and only one, of the inputs to the gate is true.

From the picture below, we can see that the XOR Gate Table the tools contain only had 1137, 1152 and 1144, which doesn’t match the service area number of 1218, which means we cannot use the formulae to decrypt the data information.

We are sorry that we cannot help our customer to retrieve her data back, but it was still a good learning experience for us.