[ale] Fixing a vfat flash drive?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 08:29 -0400, Robert L. Harris wrote:

> I need to recover a flash drive.  All of a sudden it's complaining
> that
> the drive is unreadable and an "fsck.vfat" complains both tables are
> corrupt.  Anyone know a util that will rebuild or recover the fat
> tables?
> Windows is useless.  Aside from the normal reasons it just says the
> drive
> is 0 of 0 bytes free and the only option is to format or partition
> it. 


You may want to try getting 'dd' to read it.  If you can get it read,
try running a program called "foremost" on the resulting image file, and
*then* try once again on the flash device.  You may be able to get some
of the data off of the device this way.

Foremost (web site) is a program written by the US Government and is
used for the recovery of data on drives that are damaged, using an
unknown filesystem, or trivially erased (e.g., the boot block rendered
unusable, or files are on Reiser4 and data recovery needs to happen on a
system that doesn't know how to talk to it, etc.).  I have used it with
some success on various media, including CD-Rs where the dye layer near
the top has been damaged or scratched off in some way.  I also used it
on a hard disk drive that had an NTFS filesystem and was dying to do
some data recovery.  It doesn't hold up compared to a clean-room job,
but it does work very nicely.

    ? Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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Phone: (404) 592-5746
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