0

I plugged in my USB flash drive into a port that sticks out of the front of the computer and put my files onto it. I didn't immediately take it out, but instead left it in there while I continued using the computer. When I went to stand up, though, my knee bumped against the underside of the flash drive causing to jerk upward and I'm pretty sure damage it (the metal connector bit bends at a slightly more upward angle now than the plastic part).

I thought maybe it would be fine still, but when I plug it into a computer the computer still detects it is there and will install the driver software but won't allow me to access the removable storage. On Windows XP it will show up like normal in "My Computer," but double-clicking to open it results in the pop-up message "Please insert a disc into drive X." On Windows 7 it will recognize that the flash drive was inserted, but it won't show up in Windows Explorer. It does come up in the Device Manager, though.

So since the computer still recognizes that the device is there is it possible to retrieve the data off the flash drive somehow?

P.S. this is not a repost of this, and I also have pretty much no experience with soldering so I would like to avoid that option.

Improve this question
2
  • @Moab I referenced that in the last sentence of my post...
    – Guy
    Commented Jan 19, 2016 at 0:51
  • Its still a duplicate question.
    – Moab
    Commented Jan 19, 2016 at 1:27

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Its impossible to say - it does sound like the flash on your USB is stuffed, in which case (as you claim to not have soldering skills, and even soldering skills may not enough), in which case you need to go to a data recovery/forensic specialist and pay $$$$ if the contents of the drive is that valuable to you.

Before you do that though, you may want to get another USB key, put Linux on it (Ubuntu + download packages or a rescue disk type distro), and then try using Photorec (part of the TestDisk suite) to see if you can pull any data off. Its conceivable that your disk was being updated at the time you knocked it, killing your FAT table or equivalent. Photorec won't recover everything, but if its got small documents or photos you may get lucky with some stuff.

Improve this answer
1
  • Oh well, I guess if it's going to be that big of a show then I'll just throw it out. It didn't have anything super valuable on it, I was just curious to see if things on damaged flash drives were retrievable.
    – Guy
    Commented Jan 18, 2016 at 7:23

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .