[ale] OT: recovering usb thumb drive

[aaron]

On Friday 18 August 2006 14:29, William Fragakis wrote:
> A teacher at our school has physically damaged a usb thumb drive -
> accidentally knocked into it while it was sticking out of the computer.
> Sadly, this thumbdrive held a lot of original (ie not backed up)
> material. Is recovery possible and/or cost effective?

What is the nature of the physical damage? If the USB connector broke,
then reconnecting the lines should restore full access. Cost would be a
few minutes surgery time, some solder and a USB extension or adapter cable.

Unfortunately, if the accident shorted the USB power to the data lines, there 
is the possibility that it fried the memory.

> (All her student PCs are Linux so that's my justification for asking
> here other than you guys/gals tend to be well informed and clever plus
> we plugged it into a Linux server and it didn't show up - I guess does
> that make it a Linux issue? ;-) 

The Linux USB interfaces (and Mac OSeX) support keys pretty transparently 
since the devices default to using the FAT32 file system (though they can be 
formatted with incompatible file systems). However, depending on the distro 
and config, USB keys may need to be mounted manually. I would expect that 
most any current distro can be set up to auto-mount the USB keys as well.

HTH!
peace
aaron



> Regards,
> William
> 
> 
> 
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