broken thumb drive

[jer446]

Hello. I am helping a teacher out with her thumb drive. She lost all her data that was on it. I thought no problem, i should be able to get most of it off using a program. But osx wont even recognize it, and in windows, it comes up but when i click it in my computer it says "insert disk into drive g". So what else could i do to try and save some of her data? I can't even format it, just so she could save the thumb drive..

 

[balamw]

Sounds like the file system got toasted.

Do you see any hint of it in Disk Utility when it's connected to a Mac? It should show up as a device with no volumes on it... If so, you could try to make a bit-for-bit image of the device using dd from Terminal and go looking for what might still be there in the image.

I just went through this for an SD card which got confused and hid all of the photos my wife had taken that day, not quite as bad as losing the f.s. but close...

B

 

[jer446]

in osx, no because osx doesnt show something in finder when its not recognized. In windows, it shows up just i cant open it.

 

[balamw]

in osx, no because osx doesnt show something in finder when its not recognized. In windows, it shows up just i cant open it.

Don't look in Finder. Look in Disk Utility. If it doesn't recognize the file system Finder won't know what to do with it, but it may still be getting assigned a device name e.g. /dev/disk2

B

 

[sushi]

If you do a google search you can find some options.

Enter --> thumb drive recovery software

Here are two that pop up. Some require Windows or Linux to run.

Recover My Files

Softplatz

Not sure how well these work as I have not tried any.

 

[balamw]

FWIW as part of the recovery I mentioned above, I bought http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/ which did work very well for the JPEGs on the SD card, but not well at all for the MOVs. I ended up recovering those manually using the image and a hex editor.

B

 

[jer446]

yeah its not even showing up in the disk utility.. i guess its gone..