I have a Dane-Elec 4GB flashdrive. I keep it with me at all times and protect it because it has ALL of my life's work on it. I am on vacation at a relative's house outside the country. When I was getting ready to go out for the day, I left it beside his computer. When I came back and attempted to use it, it was suddenly non-functional. I've tried waiting for a bit and then putting it back in, and I've even tried to see if it would work on another computer. Both times, the computers keep asking me to format it. I've run a data recovery program on the flashdrive, and I've managed to get quite a few of the files back, but a good majority of them are corrupted. I REALLY don't want to reformat so I'm trying to find someone who can help. What can I do to get my files back?nobutseriously, Welcome to the CH forums. Regretfully given what you have already done to try and access the contents of your drive and with the RESULTS that have occurred the PROGNOSIS for further data recovery is slim if at all possible. What it appears may have happened is that "someone" at your temporary location INSERTED the drive and then removed it and did so while the drive was still being read. They probably did NOT use the 'safely remove hardware" procedure and that is why you are where you are now. I too have been where you are and my recommendation for the future is that for important data you must retain duplicate it to more than one media location. Wish i were able to be more encouraging. truenorthWhat data recovery did you run ?
Have you tried it in different PC's ?
How is it being reported in Disk Management ?

At any rate even though the Horse is already outta the barn if it has all your work on it there should have been a backup strategy...Im sorry to say, but I get alot of this where I work = 99% of the time the data is GONE. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news... in the future back up USB flashdrives as well as your main PC hard drive.Actually, I DO back up some of my files. I have a 500GB backup that I had the misfortune of not being able to bring on vacation due to my immense fear of its being broken by rough-handling TSA. Also, I tried the flashdrive on two different computers, but got the same message time and time again. I doubt my relative could have done anything to it, since he always leaves my stuff alone wherever it is.
Anyway, I ran the diskdigger program and got most of my stuff back, but it was mostly corrupted. Then I handed it off to a friend of a family MEMBER's who said that she could fix it, only to have it returned to me with less than half of the files that were once on it, all HTML files missing, most mp3s missing, and now formatted (despite my asking her not to). Luckily for me, my HTML files are the chapters of a story I've been working on and that has already been published to the web. So as long as everything goes alright, I can try to get those back. I also found out that my brother recently accidentally saved most of my mischief on his computer prior to this incident. However, despite all that, they can't replace my dozens of notes MADE in TXT format. I know it seems impossible, but is there ANY way at all that I can pull at least a couple of files out of a formatted USB?My answer to your question would tend toward no. However it is clearly evident that an industry has grown up that claims otherwise. So depending on the degree to which you are prepared to spend money software is available that "claims" to be able to do it. Never having used any i cannot attest to their ability to do what they claim. I am including a link that explains the process and points to some remedies. It is but one of countless that a Google search "how to recover files after a usb drive has been formated?" produced. Be cautious.
http://www.geeksengine.com/article/recover-deleted-file.html truenorth
Recuva works quite well, but like any deleted file on any media, if you've saved any info to the media after the deletion, your chances of recovery become slimmer as you continue to write to the device. On flash drives, when you hit Delete, they don't go to the Recycle Bin for easy recovery.