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Sometimes, getting a second opinion can save you a whole lotta money.

One computer repair tech saw that firsthand when a woman called about a flash drive her child had damaged.

Another repair shop had already looked at it and told her she would probably need to spend hundreds of dollars on data recovery. So, he assumed the problem must be pretty serious.

Once he opened the drive up, he immediately spotted the real problem.

And about ten minutes later, he had recovered all of her files.

Read on to see how it all played out.

Local shop tried to charge poor woman $300 just to look at her flash drive that only needed the connector soldered back on.

I run a small all-inclusive computer repair business. This includes component-level motherboard and appliance repair, all the way to network and security help. Just about everything.

I was an electrical engineer apprentice before doing this, so I’m able to do repairs many people aren’t.

I got a call from a woman that her flash drive is broken.

Luckily, she knew how the USB got broken.

Me: Hello there! So, do you know what happened to the USB drive?

Her: My kid put it in his mouth. Now it won’t read anything on the drive.

Me: Well, I would have to look at it, but most likely, if the data is very important to you, you should send it to a recovery service.

Her: That’s what the other shop said, but they said they would charge $300 just to collect it and send it in and then charge more on top of that if they get the data off.

At this point, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to fix it or not.

Me: I see. Do you know what kind of flash drive it is?

Her: I don’t know. It’s from Amazon, and it doesn’t have a brand name.

This is a problem because if I cannot find an exact replacement with the exact same controller and revision, I likely won’t be able to switch out the controller IC.

Me: Well, I don’t charge if I don’t fix your problem, so bring it on by.

When he broke open the plastic, he discovered the problem.

Because the other shop was a reputable shop with good reviews, I had assumed they had done their due diligence. My assumption was that the drive had no obvious issues and that trying to recover the data was going to be a pain in the ***.

It turns out that the other shop either had a bad day or just doesn’t know anything about soldering…

She arrived with the drive, and I notice the USB connector is very loose. It’s held in by the plastic housing of those bulk, cheap flash drives you find on Alibaba.

I break open the plastic, and I see that the USB connector has sheared off and broken two of the four pads. This is the best-case scenario!

The whole fix only took about ten minutes.

Me: Hey, I don’t think you need to send this off to get repaired. I think the drive itself is intact. The USB connector just sheared off. It’s kind of the best-case scenario, but I’m surprised the other shop didn’t already do this for you.

It took me about 10 minutes to solder back on three of the four leads onto the pads, and one of them had ripped off, so I ran a jumper wire to a capacitor that was along the same 5V input, and the drive showed up in Windows.

It was very wonky, but it worked. I pulled her files off of it and put them on one of my disposable drives (I get decent-quality drives in bulk for customers’ data) and handed it back.

I did not charge, but she ended up tipping me $50 anyway.

It sucks that some of these techs not only do not know how to fix basic stuff but don’t know enough to know that someone else could.

Wow! What a nice thing to do!

Let’s check out what the readers over at Reddit think about this whole situation.

They don’t want you exposing their secrets!

Here’s a good thought.

Now, that’s terrible… for the customers anyway.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who was passed over for a promotion, so got a job with the competition and quit immediately.

This seems pretty fair.

She really lucked out finding this guy.

This just goes to show that if one shop is telling you something will cost hundreds of dollars, it never hurts to get a second opinion.

Sometimes, you find that the problem isn’t nearly as bad as it seems. You just need someone who knows what they’re looking at.

Thankfully, she found that person before spending a ton of money.