usb flash crashed with with device not recognized error

[revenant]

my trusty 8gb trancend pico keychain usb drive died today as I was backing it up.. oh the irony. I didn't loose anything I don't have stashed in other places, but it I am wondering if I can try and grab whatever is there and not corrupt with some software? most of the freeware and trial stuff I have tried doesn't work unless the drive is assigned a drive letter.. but it's not recognized by either of my systems now.. is this a wasted effort or is there something free that will mount it and get what is readable?

 

[axan]

its most likely not the flash itself, usually the usb device not recognized is caused by broken pin connections on the usb plug, you could take the flash apart and re solder the connections.

 

[revenant]

hmmm.. well, I had just copied about 1gb of data to it... then was backing the whole thing up because I had a lot of files staged on it I like to have together and had spent some time organizing on it.. then it just got read errors... when I re-plugged it, got the unrecognized device error... it wasn't warm or anything either.. just stopped working.. maybe it read into a bad part of the flash an hosed the device? could that happen?

edit: I made sure the contact were all clean.. this device is super small and sturdy.. taking it apart wont be easy.. but not impossible... doesn't seem worth the trouble now though..