If you do not care about the backstory to the issue and the title provided enough description jump down to the next block of text.
As a Computer Science student in college I spend equal amounts of time on my personal computer in my dorm as I do in the computer lab. This often resulted in emailing files to and from said computers and forgetting which things went where. I'm sort of OCD when it comes to file arrangment and hate having hundreds of files sitting around when I could have them on 1 removable drive. So I picked up a 8BG flashdrive and saved pretty much every assignment and project from my programming class to it. My OCD led me down a risky path as I failed to keep any copies of said files which included portfolio work, in class notes and examples, as well as current homework assignments. The system worked well and then the unthinkable happened. It was one of those problems that your frequently warned of, but never truly take seriously until it happens to you. As the lab PC was shutting down I pulled out my chair and the lanyard which my USB is attached to yanked out as well. I've pulled USB drives out of the computer without doing th safe removal method before so I didnt think anything of it.



Now the USB is corrupted and can only be fixed by reformatting, which would also delete all of my files. I looked the issue up online and found links to all sorts of "free" software. There are hundreds that do the same thing but I downloaded one that scanned properly, found all of my files, I was able to preview which ones they were(all of my files were there) and also select a folder to save them to. When I tried to do that they said that this feature had a 40$ activation fee aka. the catch. Keep in mind that these files were corrupted and are on the drive; they have NOT been deleted. So here are my questions.....

1. Does anyone know of any free software that will fix this?
2. Should I reformat the USB and then run the software?
3. If the USB is corrupted once is it defunct forever?

If you can direct me to some decent freeware that can locate zipped files within a corrupted USB and save them to a new directory I will be forever indebted. It will save me weeks of work and hours of stress. Thank you!

1.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Main_Page on a Linux Live CD is probably your best bet if it's just a screwed up partition table. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

PhotoRec in the same tool might be able to recover the data if you're lucky as well. http://regex.info/blog/2008-12-03/1016

2.

TestDisk needs to be done before formatting, otherwise it probably won't find the old partition table. PhotoRec can recover files from a formatted disk, but I'd do it first before formatting, if that doesn't work, then format and try again.

3.

Depends on how the drive was damaged. If it is physically damaged it's probably no good, but if the yank just caused it to complain about unfinished read/writes it'll probably be good to go after a formatting.

I downloaded Test Disk and have gotten to the section in which they show you the partitions of the drive. However no partitions are shown and have a quick search and a deeper search still no partitions are found. Does this mean I am screwed?

1. Are you using the Windows version? There may be some limiation by Windows in letting you have ring 1/2 hardware access to damaged drives, hence why I said use a Linux Live CD

2. Did you try photorec?

I am using the Windows version and I have not tried Photrec. Ill download the Linux version and use Photorec and get back to you.

Photorec managed to locate the partition and recovered all of the lost files. THANK YOU SOOO MUCH!!!!

Now that they have saved to the pc I assume it is safe to attempt a reformatting of the flashdrive and see if its recognized now?

So long as you got all the files you want, go right ahead and reformat. I'd double-check to make sure PhotoRec recovered the files you want (it just recovers whatever it can find), and if it did I'm glad you were able to recover your files.

Next step: implement a proper backup strategy.

Lol already created a place on my hardrive to store all of my most important assignments. Thanks again you just saved the past 8 weeks of my work!