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Recovering data from a thumb drive...

Nakatomi2010Nakatomi2010 Registered User regular
edited October 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
Co-worker of mine appears to have used some program, looks like a U3 upgrader, that has erased his thumb drive with several critical files of his...

The thumb drive appears to have been formatted, and re-written to... I know in cases like this involving a regular hard drive we pull data using proper tools, but I've never dealt with the similar situation and thumb drives...

Is there a program that can recover the data, or because files have been re-written is it now gone?

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Posts

  • DaenrisDaenris Registered User regular
    edited October 2008
    Well, if you have the tools to do it for a hard drive, have you checked if any of them will do it for a flash drive? Most of the data recovery tools I've worked with are more concerned about the filesystem than the medium.

    Once in the past I have had some luck recovering data from a flash drive with a program called TestDisk, but this was a different situation than you're currently facing and it may not be suitable for this.

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  • shadydentistshadydentist Registered User regular
    edited October 2008
    Hard drive files are sometimes recoverable because the computer simply changes the beginning and end so that the computer doesn't recognize the start of the file. Flash drives don't work like that, because they don't have a truly random read/write. Anything thats deleted must be deleted in blocks, so its unlikely for you to be able to recover anything.

    At least, this is what I have been led to believe.

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  • bowenbowen Sup? Registered User regular
    edited October 2008
    Yup, that's what I've seen too. That's why you can't format thumb drives either. You may be able to use HDD file recovery software, but I very much doubt it'll work.

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  • PeenPeen Registered User regular
    edited October 2008
    And this problem is why I hate flash drives. They're really handy, but way more fragile then you realize until one breaks on you (or you accidentally drop your laptop on it while it's plugged in, whatever the case may be) and you lose stuff that you needed/just really liked.

    That's why I back up my flash drive every time I make a change to it. You never know.

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