Data Recovery on a Dead Flash Drive?

Being at college and being somewhat the tech guy on compus (small campus) I had a fellow student today bring me her Lexar 128 MB flash drive. Her computer no longer responds to it when she plugs it into her computer. (the computer does not try to install it or anything.) I took the flash drive and tried it on two other computers. Same response. You plug it in and nothing happens. I'm assuming it's dead.

Here's the problem: She kept everything on that flashdrive and do I mean everything. Every paper, note, or school related file was kept only on that flashdrive. (Advised her to keep a backup on her hard drive a few weeks ago, but ironically didn't take advice.) So basically when that died, her last eight months of note-taking died, too. Is there any way to recover this data? Even if we only were able to get back parts of it, that would be a major improvement. Any tips or suggestions here would be extremely helpful. The sooner I have an answer for her, the better.

- Xierox

snif the drive..

if you smell char grill.. her hopes are cremated..


have had a number of the cpeap jump drives die as a result of the main regulator failing.. this inturn cooks the mem chip.. the damage have been caused by a badly wired USB port.. But then Lexar has a very bad reputation for it reliability of its memory devices.. .. your only hope is component level fiddling around .. but if the Memory device is dead..IT IS DEAD..

YOU DID WARN HER..

Advice: Keep a Backups on at least 2 different TYPES of Media, and keep copies in seperat locations .. that is Optical (CD, DVD), solidstate (jump drives, media cards etc), magnetic (HDD, FDD, tape), ..

Advice to her on this situation.. SHE IS SCREWED... 95% certain.. she could spend a reasonable sum on a electronics tech to attempt to get the drive working electricly.. but is she willing to pay the cost especially if the RAM chip is stuffed..

I have never tried to disassemble a pen drive but...
I had a client who saved gigs of photos that he had while he was studying abroad. He kept them all on an external western digital firewire/usb2 drive. well the drive smoked, he had unhooked it but could no longer read it. This was a major part of his life gone.... 15 different countries with all kinds of different architectural photographs.

I told him the outlook was bad but I took the hard drive, looked for a similar one, disassembled both and removed just the circuit board off the drive (couple of screws and it lifts off) replaced it with the board off the new drive and it worked just fine.... i then backed everything up and told him to buy some dvds just in case so he had another backup but the drive still works and he was one happy client.

Point of this story, try seeing if you can take the pen drive apart (its broken anyway) and see if you see any burn marks and anthing that looks faulty and if it would be able to be replaced from another drive

and keep me up to date if you try