How can I retrieve my data on my flash drive?

[rhino1616]

Hi,

I have a 1 GB portable usb flash drive thats acting wierd, all of the sudden my information is gone (I had 4 folder with vitial data on it). I was working in photoshop on a project, & when i went to save the item in one of my folders on the the flash drive, I clicked:

save as / F: drive & the F drive appeared empty- blank?.

So I saved the project to my computers HDD & opened Win XP explorer, navigated to F: opened it & blank. Listen to this one it gets stranger, I clicked properties, F: drive & says

File system: FAT
635 mb used
366 mb free

Now for it to say this Im assuming that the data is not erased its somehow just hidden (I hope). I can still save to it, i just wrote some scracth in MS Word & saved it to the flash drive & it worked perfectly. Can someone please help me recover my data, its very important. Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you

 

[MrCoffee]

ok I dont know what happended and it sounds a little weird but if I were you I would not save anything else to the flash drive, you might be overwiting your data.

Could be maybe the filesystem is corrupt (you do stop the device before you unplug it right?) try scanning it with fix filesystem option.

Maybe you can get at the data with an undelete utility? look around for one.

 

[turtile]

Use a program like RescuePro. It will get the data even if you reformatted. It won't work if you over wrote though.

 

[rhino1616]

actually your right, i dont stop the flash drive when I pull it out. I thought they were a plug & play item. Just pop it in & out of the usb drive & your O.K.
Ill try both options, as for scan it with fixc file system option is this an actually seperate program or is it a feature of Win xp?

 

[MrCoffee]

actually your right, i dont stop the flash drive when I pull it out. I thought they were a plug & play item. Just pop it in & out of the usb drive & your O.K.
Ill try both options, as for scan it with fixc file system option is this an actually seperate program or is it a feature of Win xp?

It depends on how you have it setup, if you have the flash drive setup for maximum performance then you need to stop it before you remove it, otherwise you can just pull it out. I always have mine set for max performance because the **** thing is slow enough even on USB2.

if you right click on the drive and select properties then tools there is a error checking tool, run it with fix filesystem option. Though I doubt this will help.