Format USB Drive....

L

Liam23

Geek Trainee
I've had this USB Pen Drive for a while. I've got all sorts of work on it and have never really had any problems with it. But all of a sudden it says that it needs formatting which would delete all my work on it. I cannot really afford to delete the work that is on it.

I was wondering if there was any way I could get round this and to get to my files, so i could save them to elsewhere. Or is there any other thing I could do, other than format the drive?:(

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
 
This is a lot easer to do from Linux but you should be able to do this in windows too...

use photorec to see what files you can recover off your usb drive (it can recover certain types of files, but cannot recover file names so you have to rename EVERYTHING) and then testdisk to see if you can repair the file system on your usb drive (if you can repair the file system then it will work as it did before with all your files on it, but it could make it worse so make sure you use photorec first).

You can download both from here
 
I have downloaded them both and then used photorec. It appears to have recovered the files, but i can't open them or see what is in them. They appear in the temp files bit, but i can't do anything with them.

I'm not quite sure what to do with testdisk though.

Any advice?

Thanks for your help.:cool:
 
I don't mean to hassle anyone but I'm anxious to get this problem sorted if possible. Are there any other ideas for what I can do or can anyone expand on what has already been suggested?

If not, thanks for replying anyway.:)
 
Just in case anybody cared or if someone else has the same problem.

Once the files were available but unable to be opened (using photorec), I opened wordpad and then opened the files through that. In amongst the rubbish was all the text from the files which I just copied to new files, which saved my bacon.
 
smitha said:
Yes, you should save your files in your pc and then format it...
Click to expand...

The problem was that he couldn't read the files as windows believed the disk needed to be formatted (the file system was most likely corrunpted).
 
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