USB drive not appearing absolute emergency!

[Boots27]

In currently doing my GCSES at school and one of my subjects involves a lot of Google sketch up, 2DV2 Design and PowerPoint documents. Although stupid of me, I almost always forget to back up my data and in this case I really wish I'd had. After taking my work home on the USB drive which was still working fine, I plugged it into my PC and the data was fine. I plugged it out (safely removing it as usual) I realised I needed to do some more work on it. I plugged it in and my PCs task bar momentarily stopped and restarted which I thought was odd. I then went into my PC and the drive was not there!

I then looked in device manager and the drive was detected. At this point I moved the drive into another computer. It detected the drive and it appeared in my PC. However access was denied. I then moved the drive back into my PC and the same result as before. I tried reinstalling the driver to no luck. I then looked online for help. I've tried creating a new partition as well as running data recovery programmes to recover the files but they weren't there. At this point I'm thinking all my data is gone but my friends laptop has found one of the PowerPoint files but can't open it. I'm now at a complete loss and I really cannot loss that data! If any of you have any suggestions I would appreciate that alot.

P.S this has all Ben done on windows 10 except my school PCs which run on windows 7 enterprise.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Boots27.

Creating a new partition was a big mistake in my opinion. I hope you didn't manage to reformat the drive, as this narrows the options with which to access the drive. If you haven't successfully completed that, I'd recommend that you try accessing the drive via Ubuntu Live USB, to see if it's properly recognized and if you can get to your files. You could also try it with a different USB cable (preferably shorter than 12").
However, if you've already managed to re-partition it successfully, those options are not viable, because even if the drive works fine, you won't be able to see the data. Please make sure that you don't write anything on it at all, so that you don't overwrite the existing data.
If you've reformatted and re-partitioned the drive, your only two options are data recovery software: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html & http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm, or professional help, such as a data recovery company.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD