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  1. #1

    Flash Drive

    I made a big mistake. I purchase a Flash Drive from Walmart for $20. And its true, you pay what you get. I dowload all my business information on to it. Its worth about $100,000 dollars. Now, the flash drive is not being recongized by windows. I need to extract the data from the flash drive. Does anybody have any ideas. The company I purchased from is www.crs-electronic.com, but I purchased it at Walmart. I called the company in Hong Kong, but I get a answering machine in Mandrin. Its a Flash Drive 512mb, with no security or passwords.

    Thank you.

  2. #2
    P.S. I remember I had let the Flash Drive in the USB for about 8 hours, I when i could it out, the Flash Drive was hot. Maybe the board got fried, or something

  3. #3
    Senior Member Spyrus's Avatar
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    Have you tried mounting it in Linux? Might be worth a shot. What exactly happens when you hook it up in a windows environment? Does it ask to format it or what does it do?
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  4. #4
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by mavro6000
    I made a big mistake. I purchase a Flash Drive from Walmart for $20. And its true, you pay what you get. I dowload all my business information on to it. Its worth about $100,000 dollars. Now, the flash drive is not being recongized by windows. I need to extract the data from the flash drive. Does anybody have any ideas.
    mavro6000 you made more than one mistake believe me!

    $100,000 worth of data and you don't back it up? like to an encrypted folder/partition on a PC?

    And how much do multiformat CD burners cost these days?................even a single layer DVD will hold 4.7Gb of data and a Standard CD 700Mb. Even decent quality rewritable media shouldn't cost more than $1 a go? Get into the habit of making backups. Make more than one, test them first, and keep them in separate locations in case of fire or flood. Once again you can encrypt the data first

    And if anyone thinks they are not at risk from flooding, just consider a fire in the building above you....................the Fire Services will ensure that you will have a flood......................been there, done that

    As for your question..............if you cannot "see" the storage media you are SOL I am afraid, so we need to try to address that problem first.

    Take it round a number of different PCs (you can usually find public use ones in libraries). Try using Windows 98SE, and 2000 as well as XP.

    Try it on an Apple Mac and on a Linux machine (you can get bootable Linux CDs specially intended for trouble shooting and forensics). Perhaps OS X or Linux will have more luck.

    If all that fails, then you are going to have to take it to a specialist data recovery company...................they are expensive, I warn you.

    I suspect that you may have been in the habit of just pulling the thing out?...................if you were, I would suggest that you lose that habit quickly, in spite of any BS you may get from the manufacturer. You can plug USB devices in quite happily, but you should "dismount" them using the "safely remove hardware" icon in your system tray, before physically removing them. Not doing this is a very good way of making your drive unreadable in Windows.

    I am not sure about the heat as in my experience flash drives run pretty much at ambient (room) temperature. I guess it depends on "how hot?"

    Good Luck

  5. #5

    Update

    I am previously asked for some help in reference to my FLASH Drive. I had sent it to a data recovery company and they told me that I had an "electronic malufuction". They are charging me $650 to recover 100mb of data. I also asked a quote from another company, but they told me they charge $139 per hour, but didn't specify how many hours it would take. I am sooooooo upset. I feel that I am getting ripped off. Any advise?

  6. #6
    Antionline Herpetologist
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    Nope, that actually sounds about normal to me. I lost about 5 gigs worth of photographs last year and calculated that it'd probably be cheaper to go to all those places and take the photographs again than to pay for the recovery. Also, most data recovery companies have a minumum that they will recover. So their charge may be $650 per GB for a minimum of 1 GB or something of the sort? So since you have only 100 MB of data, you'll still get charged for the whole gig.

    Cheers,
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  7. #7
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Well, I did warn you in my last post that it would be expensive.

    Basically there are two scenarios:

    1. Soft recovery.
    2. Laboratory recovery.

    The first is where your media is still physically functional and software can be used to recover its contents which are otherwise "lost" or unreadable. This is relatively inexpensive, as you can generally do it yourself with the right software and a bit of expertise.

    The second is where your media is "dead" or so badly damaged that normal reading devices won't work properly. This needs physical equipment to extract what can be extracted and then software solutions to try to piece it together again.

    The second solution is much more costly, if only because the people who do it can charge what they like. They do seem to vary quite a lot, so you might like to get some more quotes?

    Whoever you go with, make sure that they have a "no win, no fee" policy

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