All I want to get are some awesome holiday pictures back.
Lets be frank. They are not worth $1M to you are they. For that sort of money you could go on that holiday again a few times and recapture the same photos or something equally awesome.
I would have thought some talented person somewhere would be able to patch up the area of the chip
The technologies used to manufacture flash memory do not lend themselves to repairing cracked ICs. The manufacturing approach is to simply test and discard defective dies. There is no established technology capable of making repairs.
A silicon fab capable of manufacturing ICs costs $1bn. Any plant capable of repairing ICs is likely to be similarly expensive - it would need high volume usage to be economical. There just isn't that demand, most people probably find it cheaper and easier to copy photos onto a few $50 hard disks than to hope for sci-fi movie tech to rescue them.
Your talented person might need millions of dollars worth of equipment, a university-grade set of research labs, a large team of postgraduates and years or decades of funding.
and get some of the data back.
Some of the data may still be present in undamaged parts of the chip but conventional retrieval is likely to be completely dependent on damaged portions.
We're talking about a 256mb sd card here.
Imagine examining 2,000,000,000 individual grains of sand one at a time under a microscope. That's the scale of task involved. Grains of sand are much bigger than transistors of course. Transistors on flash-memory chips are far too small to see.
in a few years do you reckon the price of such an advanced retrieval could come down?
In a few hundred years?
Should I just bite the bullet and give up?
Unless you are a billionaire with nothing much else to do who can fit this into some kind of bigger plan.
Yes, after any erase, you can use any number of separate operations to write data (changing bits from 1 to 0) before the next erase operation.
You can even rewrite a previously-written location, as long as you are only clearing more bits. This can be handy for maintaining things like allocation bitmaps.
Best Answer
NAND/NOR flash is the best guess. Not much info pertaining to design specs are available for digital cameras, so the best way to answer which make/model it houses is to visually inspect it by disassembling it down to the mainboard. Check for a chip marked with the logo of one of the flash manufacturers that existed in 2006 as a reference point (Spansion, Intel, ST Microelectronics, Samsung, Toshiba, Sharp, Micron, Renesas, Macronix, Silicon Storage Technology) Find the 8-20 character model number on the chip and Google it - you should be able to find design specs for the chip that confirm it's NAND/NOR.
Trim the leads to separate the chip from the mainboard and proceed to destroy the chip by way of introducing several physical cracks. Use reasonable protection such as sticking it in between 2 layers of duct tape, wear gloves & goggles then smash it.
No publicly available software solution seems to exist as expected since everyone sets their own standard.
**Smashing the entire device and/or incinerating it - however valid - is in a grey area legally and ethically