Bonjour la class.

The wife's handed me a seemingly dead USB stick, a SanDisk Extreme 16GB job, which had been encrypted. It's got a load of her school planning work on it, and it's not being recognised on her Windows machine. I tried it on my PC, and it installed the drivers, but after that nothing in disk management (which it hung) and no other sign of life other that a flicker of the access light.

I've tried PhotoRec which seemed to be doing the job, running from a command prompt, but was going to take over 400 estimated hours to finish, plus I don't know if it'll recover encrypted files. :/ I'm trying Easus Data Recovery which says it will do encrypted files, but it's just a trial.

Anyone know of any other software that'll do the job? Don't mind trying it on Linux either, though I think it's an NTFS format.

Oh, and no backup was made. :((

I'd try a Linux Live CD/USB (probably ubuntu) - then use something simple like "dd" to take a full image of the device.

A command like this may do the job

sudo dd if=/dev/sdx of=/location/you/want/the/image.img

/dev/sdx needs to be the label of your dodgy USB stick. It will be something like sda, sdb, sdc etc (probably the later letter)

If all that works I'd then transfer the .img to a Windows system and mount it with a drive image mounter (Virtual Clone Drive) and see if that works.

Thanks, that man. I'll give that a go and report back. :)

If the stick is buggered taking an image might fail or take aaaaaaaaaages.

Might be worth unmounting the stick if it gets mounted when plugged in.

Dah, it's not being recognised by Linux at all - not showing up as a drive under fdisk or df.

 

Don't worry about that (much). Is it showing up in /dev?

Unplug it, do : ls /dev
Plug it in, do : ls /dev

Is the an extra sdx listing?

Best I've ever come across is iCare Data Recovery, originally referred to me by someone from the possie (was it CHRISSS?).  You can jim recent versions through any high street torrent site.

Something is..

I've got sda 1 through to 5 without it being plugged in, then an sdb entry with it plugged in. However, when doing:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/dave/image.img

I get an input/output error reading dev/sdb

 

Cheers, though had a quick go with the trial and it's not seeing the stick at all.

Try Knoppix. Best diagnostic Live version I've ever used.

Chances are it's the controller chip that's dead, rather than the actual flash.

If you could replace the controller with one from an identical drive it *might* work. You do have a hot-air rework station for SMD soldering, right?

I'll look into that if I get no joy today with it, thanks!

I'm trying PhotoRec at work today (I can leave it going on a standalone PC, hopefully it won't take 400 hours).

It's a weird one, it eventually got recognised in device manager last night and I could see it listed under the disk drives (at least the manufacturer's stamp) but when going onto the 'volumes' tab it won't populate the volume information on the disk.

It also installs the SanDisk drivers when put into a PC.
 

3 of them, powered by rainbows.

Could be an electrical issue, might be some cracked solder points at the USB plug. Open it up if you can to have a look inside. Heating the connection up or a dab more solder might fix any cracks.

Good point, I'll find out if it's covered by any guarantee or warranty first.

So I happened to see a later post first; I second the electrical/controller problem ideas. Sometimes if the drive is left in they get clipped by hands or other objects depending on where it is used. At work we had one we used for daily register backups that would only work if one held it in whilst holding one's mouth right.  :-/ Stopped using that one.

I've got a 4G I put through a machine wash & dry about 5-years ago. Still works great.

But how's the USB stick?

Ba dum dum tssh...

years ago my daughter smashed the connector right off her homework USB stick - I soldered an old bit of ribbon cable between the two broken parts and managed to get the files off before it was officially declared dead.

Thankfully they're cheap enough these days to only be worth repairing to recover the data, then it should go in the bin because it can no longer be trusted.