A man regained access to a bitcoin wallet after specialists recovered data from a damaged flash drive and reconstructed the password.

Incident and device condition

The owner once created a cold backup on a common USB flash drive and lost it during a relocation several years ago. The device was later found heavily scratched and nearly split, which made standard readout methods impossible without specialized intervention.

Forensic recovery process

In a laboratory setting, technicians desoldered the memory chip from the damaged enclosure and extracted raw memory fragments for analysis. They reassembled data from incomplete blocks and ran a large-scale password search using GPU acceleration to test thousands of candidate phrases.

• Chip extraction and raw-dump acquisition from the damaged flash memory.
• Data reconstruction from fragmented blocks and integrity checks.
• GPU-assisted brute-force of thousands of password permutations.
• Owner recall of the seed phrase enabled final wallet access.

Outcome

After successful reconstruction and authentication, the owner accessed the wallet that contained approximately $4 million in bitcoin. The recovery illustrates how physical backups can be restored if the underlying memory remains retrievable and authentication secrets are recoverable.