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USB pen drive inaccessible

Ok, so I have a user who thought it would be wise to only save her work on a USB pen drive. She came in to work this morning and the drive is visible in Windows but when clicked, all that happens is I get a prompt to format the drive. It's impossible to read the drive's contents in either XP or Vista.

I know there are utilities out there but I haven't got time to try lots of freeware that doesn't do the job. Does anyone have any tried and tested solutions to recovering the contents of a USB drive?

If it helps, the drive was freely inserted and removed from an XP system without using the 'Safely remove hardware' option. I suspect this has contributed to the issue.

All constructive advice welcomed.

SOLUTION

gurutc

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gurutc

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guswebb

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Thanks for the links. I've tried each of the apps on their site and still no joy.

I should have added that the drive is showing as 7.84MB in both Windows and these apps despite being a 1GB drive. Also, the one file that is of most value is a PPT 2003 file but I can't even see it on the disk as the drive isn;t being read correctly in Windows, as previously described.

Any more ideas for accessing the content of the drive, or should I accept that they are irretrievable?

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gurutc

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SOLUTION

SolarisCitizen

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guswebb

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Thanks SolarCitizen. When trying to run chkdsk I get the message...

"The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives."

guswebb

ASKER

Have tried using GetDataBack and no joy. I'm going to format the drive as this data is clearly not retrievable.

Thanks for your input. I'll split points accordingly even though no solution found.