# Corrupted USB flash drive, how to repair?



## hepabolu

Hi,

I had a working USB flash disk this morning, but I accicentally pulled it out of the PC (Windows XP Pro), before I copied off the files. Now every PC I tried asks if I want to format it and I noticed the drive is marked as "RAW".

I can see it in both explorer and in the disk management, but I cannot access it.

Is there any way I can restore the partition without formatting it? I really need some files from it.

Thanks.


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## jmwhite

If you have norton system works (specifically Norton Disk Doctor), you can try to run it and repair the drive.
I had a similar problem. The flash drive worked fine one day. After using it on a system with Win 98se, I could not access it on any other system! No system would even see the flash drive.  I had to replace the drive and lost all data. The flash drive was a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 256mb.
Good Luck


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## ukantcme

the only thing that i can think of is your going to have to format and then get yourself a copy of something like "Easy Recovery Pro" to get the lost data. most of the time even though you format most of the data that was there can be retained either in "raw" format or in its original state.


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## ukantcme

maybe try www.majorgeeks.com and see if they have got a freeware version of some type of revovery software.


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## hepabolu

Hi,

Thanks for the help.

I followed some URLs and came up with GetDataBack and R-Studio. Both were capable, not only of displaying the info still on the stick without formatting it, but also displaying the correct names of all the files and directories. All freeware I tried was either not capable of reconstructing it properly or came up with a list of "unknown1.doc", "unknown2.doc" etc.

FWIW.


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## ukantcme

good deal, glad it worked out


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