USB drive not being read, 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. And format is not an option until the data is recovered!

 

[thejackal85]

Rule of thumb for a USB drive (the thumb drives that don't require power), don't depend on their stability after a period of about 2-3 years. That's the maximum duration you can count on them being good for.

Alright, on your computer, plug in the USB drive and search and open the program "Disk Management". Does that program see the USB drive, and if it does, does it see the space usage?

 

[Boots27]

Rule of thumb for a USB drive (the thumb drives that don't require power), don't depend on their stability after a period of about 2-3 years. That's the maximum duration you can count on them being good for.

Alright, on your computer, plug in the USB drive and search and open the program "Disk Management". Does that program see the USB drive, and if it does, does it see the space usage?

It appears there as a removable drive (G) with no media and no space.

 

[thejackal85]

Alright, so if the computer recognizes it as a removable drive, but with no space or data, then that means something has happened with its filing table and it cannot be read correctly. To rectify this, you will most likely have to reformat/partition it again, which means loss of data.

There are data recovery programs out there you can try. I have used Easeus Data Recovery a number of times and it has come through for me. Give that a shot and let us know!

 

[Boots27]

Alright, so if the computer recognizes it as a removable drive, but with no space or data, then that means something has happened with its filing table and it cannot be read correctly. To rectify this, you will most likely have to reformat/partition it again, which means loss of data.

There are data recovery programs out there you can try. I have used Easeus Data Recovery a number of times and it has come through for me. Give that a shot and let us know!

After running this programme and a few others, no files could be read. Searching for one of my PowerPoint's directly through these programme's want successful. However, when I went into this PC, I noticed in the recently opened that the PowerPoint was listed and identified as a PowerPoint document. When attempting to open the presentation it said that it couldn't open the file and it specified the pathway as being the USB drive.

 

[thejackal85]

I hate to say it, but if the data recovery programs aren't finding anything, there really isn't much hope left unless you take it to a professional. Data recovery can be insanely expensive, so it's up to you. Not really many options here unfortunately.