USB Memory Stick Trouble

Hi everyone. one of the teachers at school has plugged her usb pen into her laptop and a message appeared telling her that the drive wasnt formatted and ask did she wish to format it. I have tried putting the drive into a computer at school and the same message appears. I have tried using PC Inspector file recovery but a message appears saying :-

Bad parimeter in boot sector bytes per sector (65281) > 32768!

if you press ok the following message is displayed

Bad parimeter in boot sector root directory cluster (4294967295) > count of clusters!

if i then click ok and try to recover the data an acess violation message appears.

The pen contains really important test data so important they forget to back it up any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Right click explore sometimes works.... Had this before re-formatted it, then did the recovery all worked but a bold move for you if its so important used un-delete if that helps.

Sorry cant be of anymore help

I normally stick it in a Linux box and have more luck. Windows seems to look for anything the tiniest bit broken and if so says it needs formatting, whereas Linux seems to actually want to get your data off as much as possible even if some of it's corrupt.

If you haven't got a Linux PC handy, download and boot from an Ubuntu or Knippox Live CD. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Duke

I normally stick it in a Linux box and have more luck. Windows seems to look for anything the tiniest bit broken and if so says it needs formatting, whereas Linux seems to actually want to get your data off as much as possible even if some of it's corrupt.

If you haven't got a Linux PC handy, download and boot from an Ubuntu or Knippox Live CD. :)

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how would i go about downloading that? will i need to format a computer to do it?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by leemac13

how would i go about downloading that? will i need to format a computer to do it?

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No - it's a livecd (http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download) and runs from memory without touching the local disk.

Alternatively, so you may get on better with Photorec: http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.11.3.win.zip TestDisk Download - CGSecurity (it says Testdisk, but includes Photorec)

Another vote for Testdisk

If you've never tried Linux or any LiveCDs before then feel free to give something else a go like pete said, but if you want:

Get Ubuntu from here: Download | Ubuntu

(32-bit Desktop is fine)

Burn it to a CD as an ISO file, whack it in a PC, restart and boot from CD. As long as you just choose to 'try' it rather than 'install' it then it'll never touch your drive or data, and when you stick the USB stick in it should mount it and it'll pop up. :)

Please dont take this as a criticism of your spelling - but is that the *exact* message including the spelling? If so, before doing anything recovery-wise, an anti virus scan will be in order.