USB flash drive - lost all data?!?!?

[netrate]

I have an issue with a memory stick. I used it last night, saved work on it and it was fine. This morning when I plugged it in, it wasn't recognized and the data is seemingly gone. I have tried using EasyRecover Professional and it says it cannot find out whether it is fat 16, 32, of NTSF. I really need the info on this drive, but I was
wondering what my options are. It is a 2 gig stick, generic, a gift for Xmas. I have backed up a lot of the stuff a few days ago, but I have done work on it since then I really don't want to go down the drain. Any ideas?
The USB is recognized by the system, but when I click on the drive letter in Windows Explorer, it tells me it should be formatted. Again worked perfect last night, today not at all...
I have tried it on 4 different computers. I have tried Ubuntu and it doesn't recognize it. I have run win-TESTDISK 6.11.3 and it cannot find the partition or anything! This is crazy, how can everything just be gone? The drive seems to work, but WANTS to be formatted each time it is put in. With TESTDISK 6.11.3 it cannot find a partition but asked to ADD one, I am not sure if I should do this.
I have also tried about 6 trial software for recovery. All say the same thing that there is NO LOGICAL DRIVE, I am not sure what this means in terms of recovering the data...

 

[kjv1611]

It's possible it's a gonner, since at least one app is telling you it cannot see what format it's in.

You said you tried 6 different recovery apps. Which ones? If you haven't tried Active Partition Recovery, or another product by Active, I suggest you give them a try. There's also some other totally free programs that work very well in most situations. The Active products are VERY good.

I just now noticed that you said you tried it on multiple computers. Unless the data is REALLY REALLY important, I'd just assume at this point that the card is dead. But if it's worth it, keep trying, or better yet, check into a data recovery company, and see how much they'll charge for that type of recovery.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[Noway2]

The disk drive portion of the memory stick will have a couple of header records that indicate what type of drive it is and the parameters necessary to access it. Is the stick is one of the ones with that U3 protection and did you perhaps use it? I ask because the U3 changes one of the parameters (in the MBR if I recall correctly) that keeps the device from being properly recognized. It is entirely possible that the data is still there and there is probably a backup copy of the FAT table, assuming it was formatted for FAT.

The trick will be to use a utility that gets at this information at a lower level than a typical drive mounting that isn't making sense of it. For example you want a utility that will perform low level IO operations and attempt to read the various sectors, which you can then possibly decode, copy or repair. I don't know of any programs to do this off the top of my head, but I do have one suggestion. There is a free program called USB snoopy which would let you capture the USB packets used to query the memory stick and if you (learned to) decode them you could see what and where in the process things are going wrong. The difficult part in all of this would be that you will need to learn several protocols that stack upon one another, starting with USB enumeration.