Data Recovery Programs

Can anyone here recommend a program that would recognize a USB 2.0 flash drive and be able to recover data from it?

I've tried the free ones on Major Geeks and none of them have worked yet.

I'm in a predicament of sorts and need some help recovering CAD files.

I have a description of the problem in another thread in teh hardware forum, but thought I would post here too to see if anyone here would have any ideas. I'm not going to retype the situation in detail here as that would require quite a bit of time and space. The title of the thread in the hardware forum is "All CAD files from semester gone...". I believe this is the link to it: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=76171

Thanks for any help that anyone can provide.
MIke

 

Alright, the problem seems to have changed from a hardware issue to a software issue.

I'm going to post what has been going on in the hardware forum (on my thread in there) so that the history is all here, in case it will help someone.

I'll post them as replies to my threads.

 

Alrighty, I've got good things to say and puzzling things.

First, I partitioned the drive. (It's supposed to be 512k, but actually read as somewhere in the neighborhood of ~480. I figured this is the same as the discrepancy between the advertised size of a hard drive and the room that you really get.)

I partitioned it in NTSF (I think that's the acronym) as opposed to FAT32. I'm not sure if that would be the right way to go, but it worked.

I then went in and quick formatted it.

I ran PC Inspector File Recovery. I found 275 files. This appeared to be good news, until I saw the file extensions.

I apparently have no CAD files (extension .dwg). Instead I have a bunch of .PNG files and .MP3 files. That's interesting (and funny) to me because I had no MP3 files on that drive at all. I tried to change the file extentions on some of them and then open them in AutoCAD, but that didn't work. I could get them to somewhat open in Maya, but this wasn't a quick fix and will take some tinkering (and those were only the ones with the .PNG extension).

This is not a complete failure as those files that I had as Word documents, jpgs, and GIFFs worked just fine. So, some of the files were recovered in on peice, which is great. So, thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

Now I need to figure out how to sort the remaining (~200) files on my desktop right now. I don't believe all of them are CAD files, they could possibly be parts of CAD Architecural Project files. Heck, I have one labeled as an Excel Spread Sheet and I know I didn't do one of those (btw-when I tried to open that one, nothing came up).

I'm guessing the program I used doesn't recognize .dwg files and did something to them or reassigned them somehow.

I"m not too sure what to do at this point. Should I rescan the drive with another data recovery program? Is there a program out there that would try to find out the correct file type for me or correct the data?

I'll tinker with it when I get a chance, but thanks everyone so far. It gives me hope that all my work this semester will not be lost.

 

A reply to my thread:

"funny that the PC Stats newsletter today has a Beginners guide to Data recovery on flash drives

http://www.pcstats.com/ArtVNL.cfm?articleID=1869

"

 

Thanks for the link.

I followed it and the following happened.

The second program found 831 files on the drive.

It found all of the .jpg and .giff files the other program found but found no AutoCAD files. It didn't find any "mp3"s like the first program I ran did, but instead found a gazillion .txt files. I tried to change the ending of one to .dwg (the autoCAD drawing file type) and AutCAD couldn't read it.

One thing that I did learn from the web site is that the most flash drives are formatted in FAT32. I quick reformatted mine in NTSF. I think I'm going to quick reformat it one more time to FAT32 and see if that helps. I'll wait to see if I get any more replies to this thread before I do however in case the format will further degrade my data.

Well, I think I'm running out of options. I feel like I'm really close to recovering them, since I have pulled files off of the drive and some of the files have been operable.

If anyone has any further ideas, please let me know.

Thanks,
Mike