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Flash Drive Data Recovery: Possible/Probable?

L

Low Roller

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 24, 2004
Messages
1,024
A friend of mine has a 1gig Corsair flash drive. Of course, that person had tons of info on there that is very important to their work, and didn't have it backed up.

They came to me for help, I've tried some recovery software ect. but I can't see anything. They said the data started not showing up at times, or on certain computers, and its gotten to the point now where no PC can see anything on the drive. I have no idea why they didn't backup when the problem started, but I digress.

Anyway, I started calling around to some local data recovery services, and got estimates in the $300-$500 range for their service. My question is, how likely would it be for for a service like this to be successful? The person I'm helping would gladly pay the fee to get there data back, but I'm not sure of the likelihood of success?


Anyone here have a clue about this stuff? Is it worth a try or would they be likely to just throw $ away?
 
There is free software you can get for that, that works very well. I'm at work now, but i used about 5 different programs before i found one that worked great. When i get home I'll see if i can find what i used for it, but it was specifically for multimedia and had advanced options, i just set that up took a while but it found everything on the stick. Media Recovery something i think was the name.
 
From what I understand flash is rather resilient, which is likely a reason why people ought to not keep personal info on it.
 
http://www.programurl.com/removable-media-recovery.htm

I can't find the program i used but this one looks half way decent, the one i used looked like Roxio cd creator a really early version of it. It allowed you to pick all sorts of options that actually worked really well. I would not suggest buying the software as i got many mixed results with the 10 programs i tried, i'd try them all first and then buy the one youactually use to recover the data. Might not be right, but why pay money to find out a product is crap or not the best. $60 for a good piece of software is worth it. i wouldn't pay more than that for software, and if you can't find anything it's expensive to have a company recover data from you and they might use the same software you were and get the same results esp if you're paying $300 bucks for it, many times professional software recovery costs a lot more than that.
 
Thanks, guys.

opkin, I'll check out that link, and if you find a link to the software that worked for you, please link it.

I've not done anything for a few days, I guess I'm afraid the more I mess with it the more likely I'll degrade the drive even further. I just thought the data recovery place would need to physically take drive apart to get to the flash inside. Am I expecting too much of them? Do these places just use special software, not hardware?

When I plug the disk in, pc's see the drive fine, but appears empty.
 
Just scanning the drive and stuff shouldn't mess it up too much more. You might have just fuxed up the file table or simple check disk might fix it . See if you can use a program to get an image off of the memory stick then you don't have to worry about currupting the data anymore. Could torrent it and i'll give it a shot, but i don't think i'm going to find that old program that i used, i forgot i reinstalled the os a while back and didn't keep or remember where i put the program.
 
Low Roller said:
Thanks, guys.

opkin, I'll check out that link, and if you find a link to the software that worked for you, please link it.

I've not done anything for a few days, I guess I'm afraid the more I mess with it the more likely I'll degrade the drive even further. I just thought the data recovery place would need to physically take drive apart to get to the flash inside. Am I expecting too much of them? Do these places just use special software, not hardware?

When I plug the disk in, pc's see the drive fine, but appears empty.
Click to expand...

If your drive is recognized, then chances are a software recovery program will work which any reputable data recovery software will perform its operations in a read only manner as well as force you to write any recovered files to an alternate drive.

I've used GetDataBack to recover hard drives as well as memory sticks and flashdrives.
 
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