Flash and memory cards are becoming more common. They are universal, convenient, compact, reliable, decent volumes of information can be stored on them. But, like any other equipment, various failures can occur on these drives, resulting in problems: the flash drive does not open, all folders and documents disappear from it somewhere, files are not copied and do not open. But there is no need to immediately run for a new copy to the store.
Decide for a start with whether you need the information that is written on it. If so, then you can try to recover information from the flash drive. You can, of course, use the services of specialists, but this is an expensive pleasure (you can buy from 2 to 9 new devices with this money). In order to save, you can try to do it yourself with the help of various programs. But be careful when choosing: some of them delete data during the recovery process, and if the results of the program are unsatisfactory, repeated attempts to
restore information from the flash drive using other utilities are useless - there is nothing to restore. So if the information is unique and very important - go to a trusted specialist.
If you decide that the information is important, do not write anything else to this device: a situation may arise when new files “fall” on top of the missing ones, and then the chances of returning the lost are almost zero. Before
Before starting the resuscitation process, it is advisable to check the device for the presence of a virus. If all files and folders suddenly disappeared from the flash drive, it is quite possible that this is the result of the virus. In this case, after the "treatment" all the information should appear. If parasitic programs are not detected, you can proceed to resuscitation. First, try copying information from a flash drive using special sector-by-sector copying programs from Paragon, Acronis, etc. If you succeed in doing this, you can safely work with the created copies and try to recover information from the flash drive without worrying about its safety.
If the USB flash drive is recognized as an unknown device, a disk with zero capacity or a device in RAW format when access to it is impossible (the message “insert disk”, “there is no access to the disk” or “the disk is write-protected”, etc.), grief in most cases, you can help. Most likely, for some reason, the controller chip was blocked, which is responsible for the process of exchanging data between the media and the computer. In this case, first check the performance of the flash drive on other PCs - maybe it will fail only on yours. Then see if the warranty is still valid. If the device is still under warranty, take it to a service center. Perhaps everything will be restored to you there. If all these actions do not lead to anything, you will have to format the USB flash drive, and then, using various utilities, try to recover deleted data. The method is extreme, but nothing else has been invented yet.
Using regular Windows programs can sometimes help. Go to the "Control Panel" menu, select "Administration", then go to "Computer Management" and then to "Disk Management". Then find the check with "Scandisk" and run it. If you are not lucky and the results are zero, the EasyRecovery, R-Studio, GetDataBack, RecoverMyFiles utilities can help restore information from a flash drive. Before using one of them, go through the forums. Here, not only the program and the name of the flash drive are important, but also the type of controller and some other technical data. It is a long business to describe each case, there are too many options. Having to find out the exact information about the type of device, it’s necessary to specifically understand how to recover data from the disk in your case. And here only reviews and a description of real cases can help. If the information is dear to you - do not rush and carefully read everything. Good luck!