Well, well... It appears one of our employees kept "everything" on a USB 
flash drive. And guess what? Yah, that's right. Now every time she tries 
to use that drive, it says the drive isn't formatted.

I have no idea why a working drive would suddenly do this, but it sounds 
quite serious. Anyway, now I have a person begging me to get their data 
back for them.

So what do we think, people? Is there a hope in hell of getting this 
stuff back? How would you go about it?

A quick search with Google reveals an Aladdin's cave of flashy programs 
that promise to get your data back. If you pay money, anyway. Even the 
ones with "FREE!" splashed all over them are actually just demo versions 
that show you the files it could get back if you just pay up with real 
money first. Or maybe you can only recover the first 100 files. Or only 
files under 10 KB in size. Or some other arbitrary limitation to force 
you to buy the full deal.

Dodgy, much?

Anyway, there are a couple of possibilities here:
- The drive is fine, and the PC is broken.
- The drive is OK, but there's a software glitch preventing Windoze from 
reading it.
- The drive is physically OK, but some filesystem data got mangled.
- The drive is actually broken, but most of the data is still readable.
- The drive is toast, and it's no longer possible to read anything at all.

If it's one of the first two, my job is pretty trivial. If it's the last 
one, we're going to have to pay somebody to take the drive apart and 
examine it. If it's either of the middle two possibilities, I basically 
need to copy everything off the drive and examine it somehow.

Copying the entire filesystem off the drive should be a simple matter 
for dd. After that, does anybody have any ideas for how to reconstruct 
the filesystem? (I'm presuming it's going to be FAT16... USB flash 
drives usualy are, aren't they?)

There are dozens of flashy programs that claim to reconstruct 
filesystems, but they all cost money. (After all, people who are too 
stupid to back up there data and need it back in an emergency will pay 
the Earth, right?) Surely reconstructing the broken parts of a 
filesystem isn't actually *that* hard? I mean, there are absolutely 
millions of data recovery programs out there, so it can't be difficult. 
Has nobody written some geeky Linux utility that will do this for free?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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