HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi, a few days ago I removed my flash drive without properly dismounting it and tonight I went to access it and it was corrupted. It does the usual thing, wanting me to format it but I have several CAD and Sketchup files on it that I've spent days on so I don't want to lose them. I downloaded several data recovery programs and they all came back and show that there are no files on the drive, not even RAW files. Does anyone know how I can solve this problem? Any help is greatly appreciated.

what software you have used so far ?

First off, you should create an image of the flash drive and then perhaps look at it in hex. I've seen times where they went haywire and act like they are reading data, but it's all just 00 or FF that it's returning for each sector. Another time I saw one where it totally scrambled it's own data. Lots of file signatures, but everything was complete scrambled eggs.

Just see if it even looks like real data in hex.

Make sure the software is set to search for those particular file extentions. Most software does not search for CAD files by default.

try using "Partition Find and Mount" http://findandmount.com/ to find a partition, go through each of the 3 scan modes. R-Studio is probably the best for raw scanning

Seems to me like the user data (NAND) is not accesible, at all.
No traditional recovery sortware can overcome that problem.

Is the drive still detected with its full capacity?

Can you see the drive with UVCView or USBDeview?

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... ew.x64.exe
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_ID ... ew.x86.exe

DMDE is a free disc editor:
http://dmde.com/