All flash drives, be it those known from digital cameras or USB flash drives, have a very similar structure and the same problems occur on them. Most of them are described in the guide: Building and damaging the pendrive and flash memory. In case of the flash drive repair you need to know the best now.
The most common situations include accidental deletion of data, accidental formatting of data or logical errors caused by misuse of media, including sudden power outages or disconnection of the drive without its previous de-protection.
Another, recently frequently occurring problem is the USB flash drive stops working, after which it shows much less free space than it would appear from what we buy. In this case, most often they are simply fakes, in which the firmware has been modified to show that you are dealing with a larger medium. Interestingly, often such a pen drive allows you to copy large files, which, however, cannot be opened for any treasures.
Another error that may occur to us is that the memory suddenly becomes read-only, and any attempts to write data to the disk or its formatting ends with the message that “the disk is write-protected”. Unfortunately, such cases usually mean damage to the controller or the NAND memory itself and the device simply blocks the data recording to avoid further damage. Only the reading is possible to copy your data as quickly as possible. Then you should first check the disk for errors. It’s worth doing Disk Testing then. Only then you can, for example, try to recover the firmware.
No file system on flash memory, flash drive, RAW system
This is a very common case arising from incorrect handling of the device or, e.g., power outages. Then, after inserting the memory into the reader or pendrive to the USB port, the computer asks for its formatting. In turn, in Properties, the file system that appears is RAW.
If we know that our flash drive has not been mechanically damaged and we checked it on another computer, then you can try to recover data from this device. First, try to recover data specialized for this program. You can also create a flash drive image using the program and finally restore the file system via Analysis. If the data is recovered, you can also format the flash drive and test if there are no errors on it. However, it must be done at the end.
Damage to the flash memory controller, flash drive
This is a second but more serious case. At this point, the flash memory connection ends with the message “unknown device” or the capacity is visible as zero. It also doesn’t help to check the memory on another computer so it’s not power or the file system remains as RAW, and the data recovery methods fail because no program finds anything.
The methods described here can damage your data, so if you care about them, it’s better to contact specialists. To bring the controller back to life, which, according to the article Construction and damage to the pen drive and flash memory, is the main control element for all memory, you need to know its two most important numbers.
