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I have a USB flash drive, that when plugged into any machine (XP, Vista or Windows 7) the following message is displayed:

You need to format the disk in drive I: before you can use it.

Indeed looking at the drive in Disk Managment the file system is recognized as RAW. This USB key was previously working on several different XP machines and has not been used on a Mac.

I suspect at some point in time the Flash Drive has suffered a shock, which has damaged the flash chip. Has anyone had any experience or sucess recovering data from these drives at minimal cost. Failing that has anyone got some good tips to give to users on care of USB flash drives?

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  • if this thread goes the way of a "tips" thread, can someone mark it as community wiki. Sep 9, 2009 at 13:22

7 Answers 7

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I'd recommend running test disk over it to see if you can recover the partition table I linked to some instructions for it in this question Partition table corrupted (USB flash drive)

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  • Looking good so far, good find. Running it sucessfuly on Windows 7 x64. Sep 9, 2009 at 13:50
  • Solved the problem for me, thank you very much. Sep 9, 2009 at 15:11
  • Always good to hear
    – Col
    Sep 9, 2009 at 18:44
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PhotoRec is great for recovering deleted images and other files. It's also GPL.

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I've had good luck using R-Studio to recover deleted files on hard drives, I'm not sure if it will work on flash drives. It's worth a shot -- you can download a free demo on their website.

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  • Certainly does work on flash drives, looks like a really well featured product. Price isn't bad, suppose it depend on how much value you put in the data on the drive. Sep 9, 2009 at 13:44
  • Second this--I've used it successfully on things that nothing else would touch or would even crash on. The only time it's let me down at all was a failure to figure out the RAID parameters--it appears it wasn't willing to consider that the offset was zero. I was able to do it manually, though. Jan 7, 2015 at 1:06
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Try getback data from runtime.org http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

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I've used Recuva before to recover any deleted files. It can usually recover data from months ago. It's pretty amazing. Also, it's free and it's a Piriform product (Heard of CCleaner?).

Here's the link: http://www.recuva.com/

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Recuva crashed for me when i tried it so i'd rather recommend pc inspector file recovery which worked like a charm for me.

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I've had good luck with ZAR. Free for images, inexpensive for its power otherwise.

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