Nearly dead sandisk cruzer - data recovery SW

[JHZR2]

Hello,

I have a 4GB sandisk cruzer mini, got it when 4gb was the biggest you could get and they were pricey.

Ive used it for a few years, maybe since 2004 or 2005? Dont recall exactly.

Over the last year or so, it has gotten SLOW. Worse and worse, it seemed, but then again, I had it filled nearly to the brim.

Well, one day the thing just doesnt work. Put it in, it freezes windows. Mac can at least see that it is a cruzer mini 4GB, and give some info, but it doesnt mount.

for whatever reason, though it doesnt mount on my work computer, it will mount using XP straight-booted (not through parallels) on my macbook pro.

disk utility wont let me repair, CHKDSK will tell me that it is formatted as FAT32 then fail.

So I downloaded a USB drive recovery utility from some company called data doctor. Their site is here:

http://www.datadoctor.in/data-recovery-software/pen-drive-data-recovery-software.html

It found the USB drive, I told it to do a search and it started real slow... big pauses at sector 6xxx, 8xxx, 15xxx, 40xxx, and then 86xxx, at least. I might have missed some other pauses too. Then it started going OK, and the software is screaming through in the sectors in the millions now (7920044 sectors total).

I will buy this software if it shows me that it has lots of files that I was hoping to recover (I back up these drives routinely, but there were a few unreplaceable files that I really wanted to get).

I know nothing of this company, and worry about giving them my CC number. Is there any good, preferably free data recovery software out there? It would be nice to be able to try it first, to make sure that it is compatible with the issues on my USB drive.

ANy suggestions?

I suppose that perhaps sandisk didnt put the smarts into this USB drive to write randomly to sectors instead of wearing out the first few tens of thousands... Flash memory has a finite number of cycles, and it looks like I hit it on mine...

Thanks for any insight you can provide!

JMH

 

[PandaBear]

Do not use any 3rd party data recovery tool. I have a friend who tried all sorts of things before contacting me to fix her card and the tool she uses destroyed 3/4 of her wedding photo. Basically the tool she uses tried to relocate data from some marginal area and try to rewrite it into some "deleted area". That created 100 copies of the same photos over the area with the lost photos (lost due to FAT directory being bad, therefore broken link).


For a SanDisk card that ran out of reassigned blocks (wear leveling), it will be locked into read only mode. If your data is marginal, and are able to take an image (or a dump) of it, then you can do recovery on the dump with the 3rd party tool all you want.


All of our cards have wear leveling on it. It is build from ground up to have that in the architecture and is identical to all cards since 2005. Before that we have a zone based wear leveling that is still very robust, and turn to read only if the zone is out of spare.


We have a recovery tool call rescue pro. I can send you a copy personally to see if it helps.

 

[JHZR2]

effectively I put it into the computer and it grinds the computer to a halt.

Cant get into my documents, cant get into my computer, etc.

On the mac, it never mounts at all. In windows, it mounts in a hit or miss fashion, but one can never see the drive. At best, if you double click the removable disk that mounts, it asks to insert a disk into E:

So the corrupted sectors seem to cause the issue.

 

[PandaBear]

Try to use this when you can mount it.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=157047&package_id=175444&release_id=390555

 

[eljefino]

I used something called "zero assumption" on a fubared SD card, IDK if it's just for retrieving JPG photos but it was free and worked for me!