Endless Paradigm

Interestingly, I've rarely seen people online complaining about USB drive failures, so I don't know if it's me, but when USB drives do fail, it becomes a serious pain.

I originally had a 256MB Lexar stick which died after about 1.5 years of use.  Then got a 2GB Astone and that died after about 1.5 years of use as well.  Got my current 8GB Transcend stick over half a year ago, so I really didn't expect it to fail.

Actually it didn't fail, but the drive became corrupt - the difference is that a reformat makes the drive work again, though you lose all of your data of course.
...which is a real pain, especially when data recovery software don't seem to work.
I've tried a number of applications, all of which throw out junk or crash whilst trying to scan the drive.  Some have managed to get some filenames, but after recovering said files, you just get corrupt trash.
Google is helpful because of how people are registering domains like usbdriverecovery.org in a lame (but successful) attempt to SEO their (most likely) adware-ridden products, which is followed by a whole heap of other commercial junk.
Anyone ever had USB drives fail / corrupt on them before, or is it only me?  And if it's become corrupt, ever managed to recover the data?
I generally don't use the USB for long term storage, and transfer most things off it as soon as possible, but stuff I'm currently working on, I do tend to leave them on the drive a while.  Basically, unless I can recover it, I've lost a few days worth of work >_>

Thanks in advance for any help.

I have a cheapy 2gb usb drive that randomly loses files. then again it did only cost £3 when i bought it 2 years ago. I also found that data recovery software wouldn't get anything back.

hmm.. I did corrupt my 2GB Transcend drive a while back, but I didn't try to recover...

I did try to recover data from it after a long while, but couldn't manage. What recovery s/w did you try?

I use Power data recovery.. it decent!

Ive only used picture recovery software.

sounds like an odd thing to say, but have you tried it on a linux box of any description...ive had tons of drives that XP wouldnt even touch that i recovered with no problems using Ubuntu

i get that often on my NDS flashcart.. its a pain in the arse to lose all the savegames over and over again..

My 400gb External USB drive decided today it would come up as a RAW parition and windows says it cannot do anything until it is formatted :(

I bought Restorer Pro 2000 when my photos drive died and i lost ALL of my digital photographs of offroading :( back in 2004, and started it up in vista...what do you know, theres all my files :(  GRRR STUPID WINDOWS

So i CAN recover them..but i have not the space to do so at the moment...

Then some more reading around and its probably my MFT that is corrupt, so I found Test Disk that is said to be able to read/compare/rebuild MFT and other things...it did find the parition, but it said it was MUCh larger than actual...so it is now doing a 'DEEP ANALYSIS' and has 9000 more cylinders to read.....maybe either of these can assist you some more.

SchmilK Wrote:My 400gb External USB drive decided today it would come up as a RAW parition and windows says it cannot do anything until it is formatted :(

damn, had that as well on my µSD... plugged it in and out for a thousand times and it was fat32 again.. meh

happened on my 300gb external

use power data recovery to restore 200gb i had lost onto my 750gb internal

only a season of viva la bam became corrupted

have you tried using power data recovery or recuva(created by the same people who make ccleaner)
they work extremely well

Hmm, so people have had failures before - weird that I never see people on forums complain about it that much.
My 3 year old 1GB Lexar MS Pro Duo still works fine, interestingly enough.

Yeah, I've tried on Ubuntu - same thing - can't mount the volume.

Tried Power Data Recovery - it pulls a lot of junk, but does seem to recover some things well - actually recovered some things I didn't expect it to.  However it doesn't seem to see anything in the root of the drive - one of the most important things I'm trying to recover is there >_>  It's deep scan doesn't support Access *.mdb files (they've got *.doc, *.xls and *.ppt, but not *.mdb ...).
I'll try some of the other apps mentioned here - thanks. :P

UPDATE: OMG Restorer2000 Pro is AWESOME!  It, like, recovers the whole thing - almost.  Got the file I needed.  Thanks for that SchmilK, and everyone else for helping :)