Unknowingly, my girlfriend bought one of those USB drives from eBay that's been rigged to appear to have more capacity than it actually does. She put some MP3s and some Word docs on it; the latter were not saved on any other device. Then, one day, she plugs the drive into a printer/copier at a photocopy place and suddenly it shows 0 storage capacity and 0 files stored. I've tried Checkdisk and three different data recovery programs. Nothing has worked.
We don't care about the drive or about the MP3s. We'd just like to recover the Word docs. I've Googled and Googled and, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more I can do.
Before I start pricing professional data recovery services, is there anything else I can try? Can I mess with the firmware on the USB drive? Can I crack the thing open and retrieve the chips and then... uh... do something with them?
I would appreciate your advice.
We don't care about the drive or about the MP3s. We'd just like to recover the Word docs. I've Googled and Googled and, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more I can do.
Before I start pricing professional data recovery services, is there anything else I can try? Can I mess with the firmware on the USB drive? Can I crack the thing open and retrieve the chips and then... uh... do something with them?
I would appreciate your advice.