Not mine, honest.

Wife’s colleague has a number of unbacked up (I know!) documents on a now dead memory stick.

She’s already been told chances of recovery are small – what (free) tools are there to go and have a look at it with and do a repair?

Also, is there anything that will, automatically, always backup a memory stick when it’s plugged in to a ‘home’ pc?

Cheers

Can you catch dyslexia? I read the title as … from a dead monkeys dick…

Sorry can’t help with the actual issue (or my imagined one).

Can you catch dyslexia? I read the title as … from a dead monkeys dick…

well it’s a bit of a howler, certainly.

Recuva is worth a try.

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

Recuva can’t see it – it doesn’t show in Windows Explorer but is in devices;

How far are you prepared to go to get the info back

I hear if your a fully paid up member of some islamic extremeist group recovery of anything from anything is possible in the right hands.

Might be worth a punt Waswasamed

Might be worth putting some contingency in for a new front door on the off chance they kick it in or something however.

If Recuva doesn’t work I’d be seeing whether a Linux box can see it.

We’ve had everything (500+ photos) from a dead memory card in my camera. Simply by plugging it into a linux laptop.

My son may have a linux boot on one of his machines – I’ll try that thanks.

while explorer might not mount the drive automatically, you may be able to do it manually in Disk Manager.

It’d be interesting to see what the partitions show up as in Disk Manager also.

Just says ‘No Media’

Just says ‘No Media’

Ugh. That means the memory controller on the stick can’t see the memory. I’d hazard that you’re screwed short of taking it to a data recovery specialist like OnTrack (which won’t be cheap). Recuva et al ain’t gonna touch that.

Testdisk is free:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It also includes PhotoRec, which will recover specific file types from media even if the format data is missing. I’m using it currently to recover jpgs from a friends disk that won’t mount in Windows or Linux – it will find other files types as well but you need to tell it what you’re looking for. It may take a while – it took 3 weeks on 500GB hard disk, but it just sits in the background so doesn’t cause any trouble.

not showing as a drive in TestDisk under windows.

think I’ll see if it’s visible to Linux but otherwise hand it back as fubar.

Destructive longshot – some (usually cheaper) USB sticks are actually micro-SD cards soldered to a carrier board with electronics to act as a USB stick. It’s fiddly, but it is possible to remove the SD card and use a normal card read to read it – assuming it’s the (badly made, mass produced) control board, and not the SD card itself.

There’s some useful ideas here. Something may help, possibly the last option.

Thanks. I had a look and took the USB unit and memory part out the case.

It looks like someone’s knocked it and possibly snapped the plastic connector with the metal conductive strips on.

I’m handing it back as I’m reluctant to mess with it further – don’t want to get the blame, tbh.

should be an “easy” fix then! Go find a spare usb cable, chop the end off, solder to requisite tracks on knackered` stick, and bingo!