USB Stick

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Hey guys, I have a problem with a (friends) USB stick. Somehow the data structure seems to have disappeared. When the stick is inserted it comes up as blank ie no files on it, but looking at the properties it shows 200Mb of the 256MB is used. The file system of the stick is FAT.

It seems that it was used mostly on an XP system, the ladies husband borrowed it to save a document to it (on a Vista system) and then when she put it back in the XP system all the data had 'disappeared'. Putting it back in the Vista system did no good as it was the same.

I have run the program Recuva on it and recovered approx 200 files that end in .chk. I then batch renamed the file extensions to different formats (such as pdf) and this seemed to recover most of the files but there are some that seem to be corrupt.

I was just wondering how to repair/restore everything on the stick. Is it just a case of doing a repair job on the mbr of the stick?

 

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What does disk management show? Is it assigning a drive letter?

 

Yes, when you put it in it gets a drive letter. You can then access the stick but there is no visible data on it. If you then look at the properties of the stick it shows approx 80% used space.

 

can you run a check disk on the stick? I know that you've tried recovery tools, but this may work.

 

I think chkdsk has been run on it and that's why all those files have a .chk extension.

I have never used these apps but they may be useful to you Nugg...

http://www.ericphelps.com/uncheck/

 

Ive had success with a program called getdataback, there are FAT and NTFS versions so make sure you get the right one.

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Its not free, but hasnt let me down.

I reckon that when it was plugged into vista the user got a message saying it was corrupt and asked if they wanted to repair it, ive seen that popup loads for mine when there is nothing wrong with it, if you ignore the message then you're fine, if you agree with it then disaster

 

That's probably what happened to it.

Thanks for the replies guys. I had to give the stick back now without getting to fix the problem but maybe I'll get another crack at it. The lady in question is very happy that she could get so many of the files back even if a couple are corrupt.

 

Yeah that's a pretty cool feature hey