My USB drive just got corrupted

XedXed
in Help Wanted!
My USB drive which holds my entire administration
(sales/buying/collection), school stuff and collection photo's etc just
got corrupted due to a PC crash..

Is anyone experienced in this kind of stuff and knows how to bring it back to life?
some of the information on it is not-reproducable.. so its 100% lost if the disk is dead image

any help is greatly appreciated

Comments

  • Mr. GimmickMr. Gimmick
    Oh man, something like this happened to me before, I'm affraid theres not much you can do image. I read up on some PC forum that said putting the drive in the freezer helps for some reason, but it didnt work for me .
  • DendyDendy
    Originally posted by: Mr. Gimmick

    Oh man, something like this happened to me before, I'm affraid theres not much you can do image. I read up on some PC forum that said putting the drive in the freezer helps for some reason, but it didnt work for me .


    That's the same as putting it on fire! image
  • Mr. GimmickMr. Gimmick
    Not exactly, it supposidly does work for crashed hardrives, not really sure why.
  • antofarabiaantofarabia
    i've heard the freezer thing works sometimes but also sometimes does not work ... who knows ... it's one of those last ditch efforts of sorts
  • HeartOfDavidHeartOfDavid
    Yeah, it works when you're having a physical hard drive problem (i.e. something with the actual plates). It must have something to do with expansion and contraction. I've had to use it a couple of times to make a hard drive usable enough to get information off.
  • HerbalistHerbalist
    try "get data back" software, its helped me with many corrupted drives before.



    i'm sure u can find a torrent or something to "try before you buy" *wink* *wink*
  • udisiudisi
    this is one thing I've become dreadfully aware of since I had a laptop hard drive go out on me. There are places that can sometimes retrive data off of physical hard drives, but they cost a lot. I don't know if there is much you can do for a flash drive though.



    It's made me wonder. I used to think "hey it's great to back up papers and information on a computer, so you don't lose it" , but since I've experienced a HD failure, I begun to wonder if information will eventually all be lost as flash drive and HD's all seem to fail at some point. Hard copies may actually out live any type of digitally archived material
  • RetroHackerRetroHacker
    Originally posted by: udisi

    It's made me wonder. I used to think "hey it's great to back up papers and information on a computer, so you don't lose it" , but since I've experienced a HD failure... 


    The key part you missed is "back up". One copy does not a backup make. Any important data that you can't afford to lose, stored on a computer, should ALWAYS be backed up in another place. This has been true since even before home computers had hard drives. I always had backup copies of my floppy disks, because, hey, stuff happens. Disks wear out, files get deleted by mistake, etc.

    But, with regards to the OP - your drive is inaccessable, and you have lost data that you don't have backups of. A couple of key questions:

    What kind of drive is this? Is it a mechanical hard drive with spinning platters, or is it a flash memory thing?

    What do you mean by "PC crash"? Did the computer get hit by lightning? Did Windows just lock up and when you rebooted your data was gone? Did you get a virus?

    What do you mean by corrupted? Can you not access the entire drive (computer doesn't see it), or can it see the drive but thinks it's not formatted? Or does it see the drive, list the files, and can't read any of them?

    There are lots of failure modes of external storage devices. The simplest and most common, in the case of a USB hard drive, is a failed power supply. Symptom - drive appears totally dead and does nothing. This is extremely easy to recover from, just use another power supply to power the drive. With USB memory sticks, I've seen lifted tracks around the USB connector (from repeated insertion/removal), and loose oscillator crystals inside (from being dropped), all of which can be fixed easily.

    If the drive is corrupt, but still spins, it may just be filesystem level corruption, and one of the various recovery tools should help you salvage data.

    Post some specifics of your problem, and I can try to help you through it.

    -Ian
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