Greetings!
My GF has a 4 GB duracel Flash drive that asks to be formatted each time she plugs it into her pc. I TRIED to recover the files she had on it using active partition recovery and it says there is something hardware wise wrong with the flash drive. I Right clicked the drive to view its properties and windows 7 says the drives capacity is 0mb. What the?!! I then plugged the drive into my macbook running snow leopard and it too asked to initialize the drive but in disk utility says its a 3.76 i think.. sized flash drive.. which seems about right.. How can i get the data off this stick and possibly get the device to function again?! All ideas are appreciated thanks. It certainly sounds like it has failed. Drive size fluctuating between zero and full size... Some people use a free app called PhotoRec (despite its name it recovers more than just photos), it is a command line app but very powerful. If the drive controller chip has failed, sometimes a data recovery company can unsolder the flash memory chips and place them in a recovery rig, but this can be expensive and not guaranteed to WORK.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Unfortunately a flash drives do fail, and as they are so cheap nowadays, nobody would think of keeping an unreliable one. Where I live I can buy a 4 GB pen drive for 2 UK pounds, about 3.40 US dollars.

Im using it right now as we speak however its renaming all the files to none, plus creating many other files that are called .apple files. what are these?I believe they may be archives containing recovered Macintosh files, and you may be able to open them using Stuffit Expander. (Question: was the flash drive originally USED with an Apple machine? Are you using Windows?)


Quote from: comda on May 07, 2014, 12:16:32 PM

its renaming all the files to none