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Corrupt USB flash drive. Options?

GoodEnough

GoodEnough

Golden Member
Some files are ok, others are not.

Ran CHKDSK /R
Copied all the files to my HD via XCOPY.

Google search leads to Recuva, but that seems for deletes, not corrupts.

What else?
Can I send this somewhere to recover it?
 
Yes, data recovery is not cheap try kroll ontrack. Their data recovery software from back in the OnTrack has been around forever, so it's all they do.
 
No, my point was to answer your question of sending it to them. I assume corrupt means it can no longer read certain sectors. If that's the case, it's hopeless to use software. It will become an arduous journey. You are welcome to try if you want the experience.
 
GoodEnough said:
Some files are ok, others are not.

Ran CHKDSK /R
Copied all the files to my HD via XCOPY.

Google search leads to Recuva, but that seems for deletes, not corrupts.

What else?
Can I send this somewhere to recover it?
Click to expand...

Even if you could send it out to be recovered it would probably be very expensive and unlikely to be worth it. I guess I would treat it as a lesson learned: If something is important to not lose, don't have a flash drive as your only copy of it. I apply the same logic to my phone, tablet, etc. If it's really important to me it goes on my PC that's backed up to the cloud via Crash Plan as well an alternate location on my home network. I still remember the days of floppy disks when a co-worker showed up at my desk in tears because something she had worked on for hours was lost to a corrupted 3.5 inch disk. Flash drives are the new floppies.
 
Flash drives are subject to failure anytime. Yes - they are the new floppies, and should not be used for permanent storage of valuable data, Essentially, they are expendable.
 
corkyg said:
Flash drives are subject to failure anytime. Yes - they are the new floppies, and should not be used for permanent storage of valuable data, Essentially, they are expendable.
Click to expand...

Yes, expendable is a good term. Also consider the security issues if you lose one. So besides being temporary and expendable, consider encryption for anything the least bit sensitive.
 
What file system is the drive using?

If the file system is the only thing corrupted the file data is still there and you can possibly recover it just as if it was a deleted file.

What kind of files are you looking to recover?

I would recommend copying the contents of the drive using some utility like dd for linux.
Then you can use some utility to scan through the copy of the drive for files assuming they aren't fragmented.
 
FAT32, I think.
It's mostly got a bunch of MS-Word docs.
I copied the files off using Win XCOPY.
No access to Linux.
The corrupted files has a filesize of 4k
 
It all depends on how corrupted the files are, and how they got that way. If it was a NAND failure, then, you are basically SOL.
If you *really* need the files back, or, at least, as much of the content as possible, I would still use dd, as was mentioned, and clone the filesystem completely, then, you can play around with looking at all that with a hex editor.
 
When I say copy the drive I mean literally copy the data content of the drive. That way you don't have to mess with the actual drive when trying to recover files.

The program to do this in linux is called dd but I'm sure some version for windows exists. Just copy the entire drive image to a file.

After that you can probably find a program that will search through the image for signatures of various file types and attempt to recover them.

I'm not familiar with how well chkdsk works but maybe something like this is worth a shot: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Advanced_FAT_Repair
 
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