U3 flash drive format?
 

yeah my GBs of data was somehow completely deleted in a time of less than 12 hours. Made it seem like I bought the flash drive fresh. All my schoolwork was in it too...

EVERYTHING is deleted...

Any suggestions as to how it got formatted?

I have never done it personally, but there is Drive recovery software out there. When you delete data from a drive it will still reside within a Sector, it's not really deleted until so many restarts/more data is put into it. People like to make money of Drive recovery so perhaps free ware software to recover the data may be hard to come by.

However just by Googling quickly there are trial versions available - No idea if they will actually allow you to recover it or just say "Look here it is! Just buy our product and you can get it back!"

Hope the above links help, or perhaps someone on this board knows of a free tool to recover deleted data. Most likely you're going to need a professional to get it back.

There could be quite a number of reasons why it has formatted - Hardware not safely removed, data transactions gone wrong, or just the Technical Wizard did it.

odd thing was it was many many times "unsafely" ejected and all the data was preserved. And it met worse conditions...

Tried drive recovery, and apparently it wiped everything.

As have many people; data corruption usually occurs when you yank the drive out when it's in the middle of an I/O (Input/Output from the device) operation. Such an operation could have been occuring in the background the very instance when you removed it, or you had an application running using the data.

It's less common for the above to happen on newer OS's and Storage Drives but they still do occur I'm afraid.

Just to clarify: Are you saying that you ran Drive Recovery and it wiped everything, or did the deletion of all your files happen before this?

Also as you said all your School work was deleted: Do you not have any back up copies of the work? I don't meant to sound harsh or offensive when I say the following, but it's a good idea that you back up your work on more than one device, as these things can and will happen, and at the worst possible times! It's happened to myself a few times; the first time I had a single device for saving everything and me losing a lot of my files served as a lesson for the future!

Drive recovery doesn't help with flash drives, Corel. There's no magnetic hard disk storage on them. Once it's deleted, it's gone.

That said, you should ALWAYS use your Safely Remove feature for this very reason. On top of that, do you have Vista? If you were using it for ReadyBoost, you're lucky it still gets read at all. ReadyBoost has the nasty habit of wiping out the structural data of the drive if you pull it out while it's being used for extra memory. I lost the partition table and pretty much every file that I had saved in over a year on my old-computer-HDD-turned-80GB-external that way due to my cat yanking the cord. It was three days before my new RAM came in the mail. Totally not worth it.

Sorry blue, not true. Non-volatile memory. As long as it hasn't been overwritten (!!!!!!) it's safe. That being said, it is a lot more likely that data will be overwritten on a flash drive than a hard drive.

Ouch. Yeah. Readyboost in general isn't worth it. That unfortunate to hear, though; I didn't think it was that messed up. :|

I just typed a PM to Corel about it, which I'll summarize by saying that data is harder to recover reliably due to the block-based nature of the way flash memory is written. Quick research shows there are programs out there that can recover specific media, picture, and document filetypes, because by nature the data those types of files contain is less critical to the overall functioning of the file. Music might have a millisecond hole or insignificant hit to sound quality, a document might be missing a few letters or bits of formatting, but overall, those filetypes don't hold critical, unrecoverable data like, say, a save file or entire program.


Edit: ReadyBoost may not be quite as bad as I made it sound. I should have been more clear in that when I tried to rebuild the partition table with the XP DVD, it decided to automatically re-install the OS while it was at it and I had no way of stopping it from doing so straight on top of my files.


Edit again: Also, you'll probably want to invest in recovery software specifically for flash memory. They sell it and I get the notion that it might work a bit differently than normal recovery software. You'll only be able to recover the standard filetypes, but it's better than nothing, I suppose.

This, unfortunately, is very true. If you could ensure that as soon as the data went missing you prevented all writing to the drive, you could probably get a whole lot out of it. However, we know that life doesn't work that way :sweatdrop

the U3 drive has it's own ejection method (thank god, since my school blocks the safely remove hardware wizard, for reasons very unknown) and even though the drive tells me it is now safe to eject the drive, it still happened T_T

No, in a roundabout way he's right.

Poorly-designed EEPROM will often require an erase-write of the entire larger segment to change even a single bit. Depending on the terribleness of the design, this can be a rather large chunk of data that must be rewritten for every change. The entire block is read into on-device RAM, then erased, then rewritten with changes in place. No matter how small the changes.

Potentially what happened is the drive was pulled during a file table write operation. The data is there, but a major bit of the file table is just gone.

It's one of the major stumbling blocks to proper flash-based hard drives, as not only are write times are greatly increased by the block thing, but each data section has a finite amount of writes associated to it before it is unusable, and needlessly rewriting data for a simple change is a sure way to kill a drive.

Or the drive just packed in and died. Or the designer figured it would be a good idea to always put the file table in the first few blocks. Too many writes and blammo. Drive gone. Or you mishandled it. Or any number of things happened. Bad flash memory is just that. Bad.

Things like this happen ALL THE TIME, and anyone who knows anything about flash memory doesn't store their only working copy of anything on a flash-based device. Rookie mistake.