I'm all out of ideas here - the usb stick wants to be formatted, which I haven't done, and I've tried Recuva, GetDataBack and a number of other programs without results. The stick turns up empty/blank in all programs, and my computer tells me that all of the space is unallocated and that it does not have a file system. The sectors seem empty when running programs where I see the sectors being scanned. The owner said it just stopped working, no errors or anything before it suddenly stopped working.

Bear with me - I've been at it for hours and its 5 in the morning here, so I'm very tired and I'm not sure what info you need if someone feels like helping me out. Just ask and I'll try to answer as best I can.

Thanks!

have you tried to take an image of the whole device (NOT filesystem) with DMDE and then run GetDataBack on that image?

might need NAND-chip off recovery

Do the recovery programs pickup the full size (I.e. 32 gb) or just 30mb?

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more than 32GB

Shows up as 29,8 GB in Getdataback, in Recuva it says "invalid drive size".

I have not tried the DMDE, I'll do that now.

Tried DMDE, not sure if I'm doing it right.

I'm supposed to copy the sectors, right? I get a .bin file doing that.

I'm working on a 32GB thumb drive recovery...detects as 32GB and can be imaged with no issue. Just a repeated pattern of garbage. Doing a chip off recovery now.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

No, you run DMDE and when the list of disks is there, select the USB drive and click ok. wait until the disk partitions window comes up and right click on the physical disk, choose "create image/clone". in the image window, choose destination "file" and this will be a bin file. after creation, run GetDataBack on the bin file (rename it to .img if you want GDB to see it when choosing to load an image file)

if you get I/o errors here, your drive needs chip-off recovery. If the bin file is blank, possibly your device went haywire and killed data.

If you compress the 32GB bin file, does its size become very small? If so, then perhaps it has been zeroed.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Or your controller isn't communicating with the NVRAM and is only reading a buffer in a loop...quite common.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

Looks very zeroed. Compressed the bin file, turned out to be only 12 mb. Anything else I can try? I don't have the equipment to read data directly off of the chip.

If it's a buffer loop, should it still be able to read the correct size?

Just said that it is common and I'm working on one now.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

Yeah, but you've probably got a lot more equipment than I do.. So is there anything else I could try before sending it to a lab?

Nope

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

Agree with Luke, Flash DIY is very limited.
If you want to post to AU, let me know. I do a lot of international cases, only downside is postage time, other than that no difference to being next door.