Help sought re USB stick please

hellyhelix

I am hoping someone will be able to give me some advice with a problem my student son has hit with his USB memory stick.


It is a Sandisk 2GB Orbit Cruzer and he has some university work stored on it. When he puts it in the USB port (on his laptop/my laptop/the desktop/anywhere) a window pops up saying that it needs formatted before it can be used. Yet when you click to format it, it says that data on it will be erased!

He took it to a computer repair shop and they seem to think that the "chip has gone" and said that if that is the case then there is no way my son can get the stored data off it.


He has phoned a couple of other places and they are saying there is a way to get the info but it is very expensive and I feel he is possibly being ripped off.


Any ideas? And please keep it simple as I am a "techno numpty"! Thanks in advance.

paddyrg

OK - has it been used on a Mac? It's possible that it's been formatted as HFS+, which Apple don't cross-license so Windows cannot recognise and so offers to reformat the stick to something useable.

lofielectronic

There is some recovery software mentioned on the first page of this piece with a free trial to see if it will/can recover anything, there are also a couple of other free programmes listed; http://www.computerworld.com/article/2501547/data-storage-solutions-6-data-recovery-tools-for-sd-cards-usb-drives-and-more.html

hellyhelix

Thanks for replying.


It hasn't ever been used on anything other than Windows and it has been working fine since he got it some time ago. It just randomly decided to stop working last week!

tavernman

There is a possibity that testdisk/photorec may help or recuva

personally photorec is better

hellyhelix

Thank you all for these links and suggestions. I will pass them on to my son and hopefully he will be able to retrieve the info on the USB. He could redo all the work on the memory stick but it will be very time consuming so fingers crossed we can get this sorted.


Thanks again!

flashg67

I've had flash memory failures - very annoying it is too. Perhaps he could look at double backing up for important stuff, say to the cloud as well as usb?

Strider590

Yeah, it's failed and to be honest your unlikely to succeed in getting any data back from it.

I've had two USB memory sticks fail on me in the last 4 years and one memory card.

They're only a little bit more reliable than the 1.44mb floppy discs of old and when I was at college I got through one every few months.

paddyrg

Whether or not he gets anything back off the drive, it goes in the bin tomorrow. You cant trust it any more!

hellyhelix

paddyrg wrote: »

Whether or not he gets anything back off the drive, it goes in the bin tomorrow. You cant trust it any more!

haha! That's for sure!

securityguy

Next time, use Dropbox. Or Google Drive. Or anything.