USB drive is not formatted!!!!

[Gambit]

I just got off the phone with the head sec at my HS. She stated that when she plugs her usb drive in and tries to access a file, she get's the error "xx is not formatted, would you like to format now?" The drive worked fine yesterday, but not today. Does anyone know of quick fix, just so i can copy the data off the drive. BTW it's an OLD 1gig san disk flash drive formatted in fat16.

[PEO]

Ha, seen this before Gambit. She has not done the proper procedure of remove drive then actually physicaly removing the drive.

You will need to do the following

1. plug the drive in to the machine
2. goto start control planel | system | device manager
3. scrol down to Universal Serial Bus controlers
4. right click USB Mass Storage Device and delete driver.
5. unplug the Usb storage drive and plug it back in.

See what happens there. She will have buggered up the mass storage device drivers and In extreme sercumstances will have to do a file recovery on the drive and then format the thing.

You may want to show here how to remove a drive properly so it dosent happen to her again in the future

[Gambit]

happy: I tried what you suggested and it did not work. Any more suggestions.

[PEO]

she's stuffed it then, Format the drive and then try a file recovery. sorry mate not alot else that can be done.

[mrtechsystems]

Have seen this with a lot of pupils I use a recovery program called PC inspector 8/10 recovered the files also used a personal backup of Ontrack

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

[Gambit]

Techsystems: that program worked like a charm. Thanks.

[PEO]

thats gone on my portable drive

[lovelldr]

Nice program.

Just wondering though if anyone knows of a way to recover a usb device which does not even appear on ANY computer?!

Had a teacher whose memory stick died, where it would not appear in ANY computer. Just did not show at all. Just put it down to the fact that it was old, and she hadn't taken much care of it.

Then, she had a new one which was about 3-4 days old, and exactly the same thing happened to it.

What could cause this to happen? Is it something which she'd done to it (my guess, as with it happening so close to each other), dodgy memory sticks (and she was just unlucky), or memory sticks in general (which I know are a bit of a pain at times anyway!)

Would appreciate other peoples thoughs on this

And sorry to the OP for thread hi-jacking, if you want, I'll create my own

[Midget]

lovell> we get quite a lot of those, on the whole the easiest way to fix is to swap the 40pin memory chip off the board onto an identical one.

[RabbieBurns]

Ive got a usb drive here I'm trying to sort, same problem as above, normally I use GetDataBack and it works for this type of problem easily, but with this one it doesnt find any file system at all. Ive tried also the aforementioned software but that doesnt work, it keeps giving wierd errors.

Anything else I can try?

[Michael]

Another basic procedure (before using recovery tools), is try another USB port or another machine altogether!

[Geoff]

I find my linux desktop pc a little more tolerant of broken usb sticks.

[RabbieBurns]

Another basic procedure (before using recovery tools), is try another USB port or another machine altogether!

yeh its been brought to me as a last resort

[RabbieBurns]

I find my linux desktop pc a little more tolerant of broken usb sticks.

Ill fire up a livecd and give it a shot. cheers

[PiqueABoo]

I had one of those recently.. several utils couldn't hack it but I used (the free) photorec to find the files and that worked just fine. Didn't recover the original file names though, but i didn't care much about that. Warning: it runs in a DOS box.