USB stick, Raw file system, wrong format capacity

Hi,

My friend has recently given me her usb stick to fix but I'm completely lost. She was working in Photoshop on a file on her USB stick when it froze and crashed, since that point she hasn't been able to access her USB stick it says it 'needs to be formatted' I've tried a bunch of recovery software to try and repair the drive without having to format it or to recover the data but not a single one can find any files on it they just display a root of RAW.

So i decided to format the drive and then to try and recover the data after that but it says that the capacity of the drive is 64mb (its a 16gb drive) This is through windows but i also tried HP's usb format tool and that also gives a capacity of 64mb

It has a whole term of Uni work on it so any help would be greatly appreciated, ill happily supply more info if you request it

Thanks

Henry

 

It sounds to me like she got one of those "doctored" USB drives I've heard about where the flash drive is altered to make it seem as if it has more capacity than it actually does.

There's a Flash Drive tester that you can try on the flash drive to see if this is the case and what the true capacity of the flash drive is.

If you were able to format it, the info that was on it is lost anyway.

 

I've got what's considered to be the gold standard for testing flash drives and SD cards — h2testw.

I've attached a zip file you should be able to download that contains h2testw, FDBENCH and instructions for h2testw.