How to use the inside of a usb stick with out the usb

In theory, assuming that the flash memory chip itself isn't the thing that's dead, you could buy a second, identical USB stick, remove the flash chip from it, and then solder the chip from the dead stick onto the new one.

But I gotta tell you, the surface-mount chips they use these days are basically impossible to hand-solder. I really don't see any practical way to do this.

The lesson to be learned here is to never, ever rely on only one storage device to hold data that's important to you.

Depending on where it's broken, you may be able to:

- cut a USB cable in half,
- strip back the wires,
- solder the wires to the old contact points on the usb stick

Then plug the cable into a USB port and copy off the info.