Help sought re USB stick please

John_Gray

It's always possible that the file structure on the USB Flash Drive has become stuffed (that is, functionally inoperative) because the "Safely Remove Hardware" procedure hasn't been gone through consistently, every time the drive was removed...

tavernman

securityguy wrote: »

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

John_Gray wrote: »

It's always possible that the file structure on the USB Flash Drive has become stuffed (that is, functionally inoperative) because the "Safely Remove Hardware" procedure hasn't been gone through consistently, every time the drive was removed...

Stable door - not very helpful though is it? Hopefully the flash drive may be recoverable using testdisk

mije1983

tavernman wrote: »

Stable door - not very helpful though is it?

The information posted may well have been unknown to both the OP and their son, which means they actually will be incredibly helpful and useful.

The OP has been given alternative cloud storage options so their son can double back up his work in future, and also been given a possible reason for the drive failure, which can be used to try and prevent it happening again.

tavernman

mije1983 wrote: »

The information posted may well have been unknown to both the OP and their son, which means they actually will be incredibly helpful and useful.

The OP has been given alternative cloud storage options so their son can double back up his work in future, and also been given a possible reason for the drive failure, which can be used to try and prevent it happening again.

As I said stable door, it's like saying "restore it from the backup he has"
I have given a possible free solution which may or not work. We all know that the first thing you should do is work out a back-up solution before you start using a PC , adding post disaster solutions does not really help does it , or is that just me

Edited: Oh and have you added any useful suggestions to the Op's problems, or are you just doing a drive by shooting?

NiftyDigits

I recovered a friend's data in such a situation. Though I can't remember how I did it now.

Perhaps with Partition Find & Mount Tutorial here

Otherwise TestDisk & PhotoRec it may have to be.

As to the 'chip gone' nonsense....

RumRat

tavernman wrote: »

As I said stable door, it's like saying "restore it from the backup he has"
I have given a possible free solution which may or not work. We all know that the first thing you should do is work out a back-up solution before you start using a PC , adding post disaster solutions does not really help does it , or is that just me

Edited: Oh and have you added any useful suggestions to the Op's problems, or are you just doing a drive by shooting?

Once you've been on here a bit longer, you will see that this is not correct....;)

epninety

Try mounting the stick in a Linux machine such as Ubuntu. You could write a 'Live' linux cd, boot from that and try mounting the drive in that.

Some software does odd things to the disk format and it can cause headaches. I've got two sticks here I've been playing with this afternoon, that won't reliably mount in Win boxes, but I can read and write to them from a Linux box (and yes they are FAT32 formatted).

Chrisblue1962

epninety wrote: »

Try mounting the stick in a Linux machine such as Ubuntu. You could write a 'Live' linux cd, boot from that and try mounting the drive in that.

Some software does odd things to the disk format and it can cause headaches. I've got two sticks here I've been playing with this afternoon, that won't reliably mount in Win boxes, but I can read and write to them from a Linux box (and yes they are FAT32 formatted).

Thanks for that epninety, I'll try to remember that one

Laz123

Another suggestion: convert the file format from FAts32 to NTFS

Gillor

If you haven't already solved the problem, Giveaway of the Day are offering MunSoft Data Recovery Suite 2.0 free today here (normally retails for $99.95).

I've not tried it but a couple of reviews seem quite positive so may be worth giving it a go. I assume (rightly or wrongly) that if Munsoft are expecting people to normally shell-out the best part of 100 dollars it must have something going for it.