JHZR2
Staff member
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
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