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mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

by Fluffdaddy
Problem description: My dad's off-brand flash drive stopped working, and although it's not life or death, there are some files that would be nice to recover. In my PC, it does show up as an unformatted (RAW) removable drive, so Windows offers to format it, which I don't do of course.

Attempted fixes: Tried Recuva, but it doesn't detect the filesystem and fails to do anything. So I left it to be cloned with dd overnight, but it was super slow with the default block size and didn't complete by morning. Restarted with 4MB, which should get it done quicker while I'm off at work.

Operating system: Dad mostly uses it to access large files from his Android phone. I tried Win7 64 and Kali Linux.

I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes

So yeah, does anyone have experience recovering data in such cases? Since the drive is accessible I suspect that everything is still on it, and it's only a matter of getting something to analyze the content and spit out the files. There's a ton of apps on google claiming to do this but most that I saw so far are paid so I'd appreciate some suggestions. CLI or Linux :spergin: solutions are fine.

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mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

by Fluffdaddy
Thanks, PhotoRec recovered a bunch of files - I'll check if any are missing.

TestDisk looks like exactly what I'd need in this case in order to keep all the files including their names, but I wasn't able to get anywhere so far. The first Analyze step finds the FAT32 partition, but the further Quick/Deep Search don't find anything. I tried adding a partition manually but looking at the files, I never got it set up correctly.

mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

by Fluffdaddy
Yeah I made a full image already, now lives on my disk. Still not much luck recovering the filesystem so far though.

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