Unreadable USB Stick

Computer Hardware
#1

A friend has asked me to try to rescue the data on her USB stick. ATranscend V15 8GB.

She says she thinks she pulled it out of a port a bit too early…so it was possibly not ready.

Now the stick is unreadable…it is recognised and assigned a drive letter, and the blue light blinks as if it´s ok, but doesn´t respond if double clicked to open it.
However, it´s possible to right-click it…the usual dropdown list appears, but one can only access “properties”…nothing else.

Rescue software is not able to see any file structure.

Any ideas
Thanks

#2

Get a Linux bootable CD/DVD. It can access the drive directly (i.e. not using the filesystem) and also has different FAT code. Type ‘dmesg |grep sd’ and look through the output to determine what it is called - it should be sd followed by a single letter for the disk, and possibly a number for the partitioned (assuming it is partitioned!). Either plug in another USB memory/disk or mount your Windows partition.
Make a full backup of the USB memory with 'dd if=/dev/sd[whatever the device/partition showed up as from dmesg] of=[the path to where you want to put it and the filename]
Create a mountpoint with 'mkdir [whereever you want to put it]'
Try mounting it with 'mount -o loop [what you called the backup] [what you called the mountpoint]
If you are lucky, this might allow you to access the data and copy it to another device. If not, try the following:
'fsck [what you called the backup]'
If fsck at some point gives you several options and you don’t know which one to go for, just pick one and if it later seems to be the wrong one, just redo the backup.

#3

Wow…sounds quite complicated, but I´ll give it a try. Thanks :smiley:

I´ve never used Linux before: So, I´m downloading an iso from here:


to make a CD which as far as I understand will allow me to start my lappy in Linux…we´ll see what happens after that.

#4

Maybe is better to get something like Ubuntu or System Rescue CD for this kind of operations :slight_smile: