USB Flash Drive Crash

[mahveeto]

Hi. I had a USB flash drive crash suddenly. I scanned it with a file recovery software and it seems there are hundreds of .TMP files added and all of the other files were broken into hundreds of smaller files.

I recovered the files thinking that would fix it, but it didn’t. I can’t open any of them - they all say “unsupported format”. They are mostly Excel, .pdf, .txt, and .jpg files. I’ve attached a screen shot for reference. Can anyone help?

[Bruce]

the recovery software can only get back what it sees from the information available.
it gets that info from the file table and if that is unavailable it can only read blocks with no idea of the contents.
that’s one reason for the ‘bits of file’, add to that the fragmentation, the way the drive was formatted, the I/O on that drive since the crash, and the size of files and it all quickly adds up to a very luckily process to get anything back in one piece.

all the files it has recovered say unsupported because there is not any recovered data for Windows to determine the file type.

you could try Recuva by Piriform in an attempt to see what it could recovery, but really, your chances are so slim I’d not be bothering.

sadly, the lesson to be learnt here is not to have all your eggs in one basket.
USB sticks tend to die a lot more often than any other storage medium, simply due to them being ripped out of the port without proper ejecting first.

[mahveeto]

the recovery software can only get back what it sees from the information available.
it gets that info from the file table and if that is unavailable it can only read blocks with no idea of the contents.
that’s one reason for the ‘bits of file’, add to that the fragmentation, the way the drive was formatted, the I/O on that drive since the crash, and the size of files and it all quickly adds up to a very luckily process to get anything back in one piece.

all the files it has recovered say unsupported because there is not any recovered data for Windows to determine the file type.

you could try Recuva by Piriform in an attempt to see what it could recovery, but really, your chances are so slim I’d not be bothering.

sadly, the lesson to be learnt here is not to have all your eggs in one basket.
USB sticks tend to die a lot more often than any other storage medium, simply due to them being ripped out of the port without proper ejecting first.

Thank you for the detailed response. I just tried Recuva and as you said, it did not work. Luckily nothing on this USB drive was too important, but nevertheless lesson learned.

Thanks