recovering file from broken flash drive

[Harley Pyles]

Hello Sector 67,

I am working with some exchange students from France this summer, one of whom is distraught over a broken flash drive. In short, she has a 30 page paper due Sunday and her only recent copy of the file was on the flash drive. Furthermore, it was her late father's flash drive and carries some sentimental value, but I think her main concern at this point is the word document. 

We've tried it on windows and mac. On windows it recognizes that a device is connected but doesn't get any further. On mac nothing happens whatsoever; I can't find the directory with finder or terminal.

We took it to tech support here at UWW, and they attempted to use data recovery software of some sort (sorry I should have written its name down; I can find out if necessary) but this failed to work as well. 

The chip itself is very accessible. There aren't any visible signs of damage on the chip, at least to me or the people at tech support.

Anyways, I told her I would shoot you an email because if anyone would know what to do at this point, its you folks.

Harley

[Joe Kerman]

Is the device physically broken, or did it just stop working suddenly?

It would be possible to buy an identical model flash drive, and try swapping out the controller or memory chip on the new one, with the old one. But if this student has any cash to spare, I highly recommend looking into data recovery services. Almost all of them do this type of recovery on flash drives.  I'm sure someone at sector has the skills to try to do this , but you would be in better hands with someone who has done this thousands of times.

I haven't used a data recovery service for a flash drive myself, but have heard many success stories from others who have.

There is at least one place located in madison that you could drop the drive off at in person, instead of having to trust a random company and mail it to them. https://gillware.com

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[Alex Kovell]

I can offer nothing in the way of help with the flashdrive.  But you might suggest they consider using dropbox.com to save their work to in the future.

[Chris Meyer]

There's also a Wisc data drive you can use that has similar features as drop box.  I've used GetDataBack before, you should probably get a low level bit-wise clone of the drive ASAP for data recovery purposes, and only read from that in the future unless you give it to a professional recovery place.  GetDataBack has a free demo that will show you the files it can recover, it's unfortunately unlikely to be effective though if the drive is unrecognizable unless it's lost its volume formatting.  

On the extremely unlikely to help end, I know there's verifiable research that high temperature thermocycling will help to recover data on flash drives:

http://static.usenix.org/event/hotstorage11/tech/final_files/Wu.pdf

Chris

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Harley Pyles <pyles...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Peter Novotnak]

"ddrescue first, as questions later."

You could get Jesse Ransom a 6-pack to look at it under a magnifying glass and make sure the traces are all good, solder joints, etc. Two places to start anyway.

-Peter

[Harley Pyles]

Thanks guys,

I guess it just stopped working. She says her computer has been overheating here, and cites the different voltage supply. However the folks at tech support said that was an unlikely culprit because the computer would only draw what it needs. Anyway, she had left the flash drive plugged into her potentially overheated laptop for a long time and next time she tried it it wasn't working.

The flash drive is a brand from France, so finding an identical one may well required for shipping one overseas. Also, everything is soldered down with minute connections so transferring a component seems like it would be very difficult.

I looked into gillware, and the automatic estimate generator produced two prices for different problems: $200 for "Broken electrical connections that will require electrical rework" or $2000 for "Controller failure requiring raw data read and data reassembly". I'm guessing we would have to let them take a look at it to find out which one it is. Would any of you have a guess if its the former or the latter based on the scenario?

She's heard a lot about the importance of backing up recently, so I'll be sure let her know about dropbox but probably after a few days to let things cool down.

Chris, could you explain a bit more about what/how one gets a low level bit-wise clone? Unfortunately its already been plugged into > 4 computers with different people trying to access the data. Whoops.

I'm going to give ddrescue a shot, unless you think it is vital to not try to access it anymore. If that doesn't work there certainly is a six-pack in it for Jesse if he wants to take a look at it.

[nero_lumos]

I've got equipment (key piece being a microscope) to inspect and touch the components on a flash drive.  Feel free to stop by sector with it and we can look,and touch up things as needed.

But the sequence of events make it seem more like a file system issue than a physical connection problem - no thermal shock, no vibration or mechanical shock. 

The low level tool that Peter suggested seems the most likely to succeed, but we can rule out simple connectivity issues if you'd like.

-ken

[Harley Pyles]

I got stuck with a problem with apt-get installing ddrescue yesterday, but I tried again over lunch today and after restarting and it seems to have worked. I didn't have time to wait for ddrescue to install though, so I'll give it a shot this evening. I'm cautiously optimistic because the drive was shown to mount in the system log, just like in the youtube video I'm following. I'll let you know how that goes.

Assuming I'm able to make an image copy, is it better to mount it onto a new drive or to try to recover the files with Photorec or TestDisk? Both? Sorry for all the questions, I'm a total noob with this stuff. 

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[Peter Novotnak]

What you are looking for is a 'loop mount'

http://major.io/2010/12/14/mounting-a-raw-partition-file-made-with-dd-or-dd_rescue-in-linux/

• Make a backup (you could compress it with gzip)
  
• Make a backup
• Just mount the file, and use your tools against it as if it were a physical drive.
  

[Harley Pyles]

Thanks guys!

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to copy it's image. ddrescue is reporting "ddrescue: Can't open input file: No medium found."

On the bright side, she apparently has a more recent version than I had initially thought. She still lost a couple day's work, but doesn't have to start from scratch. I'll ask if she wants to look into checking its hardware when I see her tomorrow.