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flash drive ejected improperly- lost files

Someone I know was in college and they were working in Flash CS3 and their USB flash drive got pulled out accidentally. Now, it is not being recognized by Mac or PC. The said flash drive has been used mostly with Mac but might have been used in PC. (Friend doesn't remember.) What can we do to recover the information from drive - no computer acknowledges it? Could it be that the connector is damaged?

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as techie007 noted, duplicate of superuser.com/questions/89579/… – quack quixote Dec 31 '09 at 0:31
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closed as exact duplicate by quack quixote, Diago Dec 31 '09 at 7:43

This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

2 Answers

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(re done from other answer)

If it is not recognised at all (as if device is dead), there are a few ways:

  1. Send to a data recovery company.
  2. Buy an identical stick and swap the memory module across (careful and be quick, had quite a lot of success with this).
  3. Check contacts.

As you said, it is not recognised at all rather than corrupt or not working, this usually means hardware failure more than anything else - so it is worth checking in case it really was yanked out to fast and the contacts broke. If the contacts are fine, it could of just been a cheap stick and has a unknown/cheap chipset, I have seen many that go faulty for all sorts of random reasons and in which case, as I said, moving the memory chip to an identical stick can sometimes fix it.

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Opened, Soldered and it worked. 4 contacts were cracked. Info saved. – Moshe Dec 31 '09 at 6:09
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up vote 1 down vote

Just covered here:

http://superuser.com/questions/89579/flash-drive-ejected-improperly-lost-files

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'twas the friend. 2 Macs and 3 PCs. Soudns about right. Thanks. – Moshe Dec 31 '09 at 0:21
Small world. ;) – techie007 Dec 31 '09 at 0:25
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