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Strange Problems with Pendrives


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Is there a way to recover them? And whether there is or not, this drive is destined for a repartition and reformat!

PHOTOREC:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

If you know the file types it should be also rather quick.

Or any other file recovery software.

See also here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/recovering-accid...es-t113511.html

http://www.msfn.org/board/data-recovery-tool-t84345.html

jaclaz

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  • 4 weeks later...

Ok, time to return to this problem...

After losing power for 10 days throughout Christmas, and twice going through ~12GB of data recovered from the disk in search of less than ~10MB of data (including over 3,000 text files!) :wacko:

PhotoRec managed to find most of the files that I needed back, but I lost my edited scripts for KDE and such. At least it recovered the graphics, text files can be rewritten.

I think I have recovered everything I can from the drive, so now it's time to repartition and reformat. jaclaz, I remember you posted a link earlier to some tools for achieving this, just wondered if anyone had a specific recommendation. I'd prefer something that runs in 98 if possible, but I can use XP if I must.

Also.. is there a way to do a thorough "test" on a flash drive? I took a look at some of the reviews on this drive at Newegg where I ordered it from, and it seems that this particular model of Data Traveler seems to have more problems than others. (I know reviews can be subjective, but it's got me wondering.)

@jaclaz

A special thanks for sending me to the PhotoRec/TestDisk site, because it's been more useful than I ever imagined (I think you saw my post in the Windows XP forum) :thumbup

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PhotoRec managed to find most of the files that I needed back, but I lost my edited scripts for KDE and such. At least it recovered the graphics, text files can be rewritten.

I think I have recovered everything I can from the drive, so now it's time to repartition and reformat. jaclaz, I remember you posted a link earlier to some tools for achieving this, just wondered if anyone had a specific recommendation. I'd prefer something that runs in 98 if possible, but I can use XP if I must.

oh, oh....

blatant breaking of "Rules" #2 and, much worse, #4 detected :w00t::

http://www.msfn.org/board/data-recovery-to...345-page-7.html

No way I can suggest an utility over the other (because of the "assumptions" ;)).

The hard way :ph34r: (and needing 2K/XP):

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=5000

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...c=5000&st=1

(but my assumptions are as good as anyone else's ;))

The good ol' way (DOS), though accessing USB through DOS is YOUR problem ;)):

http://www.ranish.com/part/

ANOTHER experimental way:

http://partitionlogic.org.uk/index.html

Also.. is there a way to do a thorough "test" on a flash drive? I took a look at some of the reviews on this drive at Newegg where I ordered it from, and it seems that this particular model of Data Traveler seems to have more problems than others. (I know reviews can be subjective, but it's got me wondering.)

Sure there are ways.

But "thorough" is quite a "heavy" word. :whistle:

Expecially if the thingy has some form of "wear leveling" the ONLY thing you can actually rely on is the APPROPRIATE "Manufacturer Tool" (if available).

Compare with these, to have an idea of what I am talking about:

http://www.msfn.org/board/screwed-up-usb-drive-t137990.html

http://www.forensicfocus.com/index.php?nam...opic&t=3542

@jaclaz

A special thanks for ....

You are welcome. :)

jaclaz

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I think I have recovered everything I can from the drive, so now it's time to repartition and reformat. jaclaz, I remember you posted a link earlier to some tools for achieving this, just wondered if anyone had a specific recommendation. I'd prefer something that runs in 98 if possible, but I can use XP if I must.
The good ol' way (DOS), though accessing USB through DOS is YOUR problem ;)):

http://www.ranish.com/part/

That's exacltly how I do it: the Ranish Partition Manager (with v. 2.40 or 2.44 Beta!) in Win 98 SE with NUSB 3.3 providing the disk access. Works like a charm! I described it in more detail in this post. So long as you restrict yourself to partitioning and formating just the pen-drive, it's pretty safe. Now, if you mess with a fixed disk by mistake... :ph34r: Well, now you cannot say you were not warned. :)
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oh, oh....

blatant breaking of "Rules" #2 and, much worse, #4 detected :w00t::

jaclaz

:o Ok, Ok, I won't give up on it yet. Time to test other tools I suppose. :)

The good ol' way (DOS), though accessing USB through DOS ... in Win 98 SE with NUSB 3.3 providing the disk access.

I think I'll probably use this method whenever I've tried out some more of jaclaz's recovery tools. :thumbup

Of course.. now I have another flash drive "problem" for you guys :ph34r:

Just bought a new pair of Kingston 8GB Data Travelers. Ive been using one of them in an XP environment at college with no data problems so far. I decided I would insert the other (still blank) one to have a look at it and make sure that it was recognized properly. It was, and it shows up in both 98 & XP. However.... I happened to notice that they show a different "Used space" count in their General Properties tab in each OS. :blink: (Screenshots below)

Could something like this be responsible for the problems that I had with the original 16GB drive? If so, what do I do to correct it before I lose more data?

KDT8GB98.jpg

KDT8GBXP.jpg

Edited by LoneCrusader
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"Curioser and curioser", as Alice would put it! :D

Let's sure investigate further your finding. So, while we're at it:

1) Don't write anything to it.

2) Don't format or reformat it.

3) Don't partition or repartition it.

(I'm sure waitng a few days before starting to use it normally should be bearable, since you've just bought it and are as curious, as I am to figure out what's happening. Knowledge is sure worth the wait :) ).

4) Can you create a full-disk,blind sector-by-sector image of it? As it's new, most of it probably is already zeroes, so it ought to compress nicely, for us to be able to peruse its internals... What imaging software do you have at hand? And, last, but not least, what, if any, hexeditor do you have at hand?

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"Curioser and curioser", as Alice would put it! :D

... Knowledge is sure worth the wait :)

Yes. :yes: I plan to get to the bottom of this somehow, these things are driving me crazy. :crazy:

(Off Topic Rant)

I've always hated USB devices. I used Windows 95 forever, and loved it, and I hated anything that would not work in it. My little Windows 95 desktop ran anything and everything I wanted it to back in the day. I once bought an external CD burner that connected to the parallel printer port to avoid having to upgrade to 98 to use a USB one. :w00t: Haha!

Even after later having to upgrade to 98SE, I avoided buying ANY device that required USB up until about 8 months ago, when I discovered NUSB on here. And since then, with these weird problems, my opinion of USB devices has not improved much! :thumbdown

(/Off Topic Rant)

4) Can you create a full-disk,blind sector-by-sector image of it? As it's new, most of it probably is already zeroes, so it ought to compress nicely, for us to be able to peruse its internals... What imaging software do you have at hand? And, last, but not least, what, if any, hexeditor do you have at hand?

I've not done a lot of work with imaging other than what has been discussed here in the other threads. I'm all ears though. It might take me some time, just tell me what I need to do.

I have PowerQuest DriveImage 2002, and I'm most familiar with it. I also have Partimage which I have used a little. Beyond that, I have a Clonezilla CD somewhere that I haven't used. I'll have a look around and see if there's anything else I haven't thought of. If you guys need me to use a specific program for anything, just say so.

I have basically zero experience with Hex Editing. Not that I wouldn't like to learn. :sneaky: But I have UltraEdit-32 v11.20b and a very basic program called HexEdit on hand.

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The only thing we need, at this point, is a raw image of the whole pendrive, that is, the usual dumb sector-by-sector full-disk image. Now, since the pendrive has 8 GB, the program to be used must be able to span the image in parts smaller than 4 GB (or, even better, 2 GB), because of the FAT-32 max file limit of 4 GB. Then, using 7-zip, it's easy to compress the image (to a very tiny size, because hopefully there is mostly zeros in the pendrive) and upload it for us somewhere, so we can all look inside it and reach an opinion. Of course, the above is the most paranoid way of doing it. We could, for a start, limit ourseves to two 1 GB partial images, one from the begining and the other from the end of the pendrive, and it probably would be enough. All the programs suggested are good ideas, in principle. The first one jaclaz pointed to seems particularly adequate to this task, but I'm not familiar with it. And I asked about an hexeditor, because you'll need one to look inside the images, and also might, all else failing, use it to generate the images themselves (of course, I doubt that it should ever be the case). So, as soon as you have time for it, let's start with the two 1 GB images, and see what we learn from them, OK? Good luck!

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Of course.. now I have another flash drive "problem" for you guys :ph34r:

Just bought a new pair of Kingston 8GB Data Travelers. Ive been using one of them in an XP environment at college with no data problems so far. I decided I would insert the other (still blank) one to have a look at it and make sure that it was recognized properly. It was, and it shows up in both 98 & XP. However.... I happened to notice that they show a different "Used space" count in their General Properties tab in each OS. :blink: (Screenshots below)

Could something like this be responsible for the problems that I had with the original 16GB drive? If so, what do I do to correct it before I lose more data?

kdt8gb98.jpg

kdt8gbxp.jpg

Try repeating the two tests. Windows may have added a hidden file or folder in between the first two tests.

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Try repeating the two tests. Windows may have added a hidden file or folder in between the first two tests.

Checked them again, same result. I have both 98 and XP set to show all hidden/system files.

Also the numbers seem too perfect... 4096 and 8192...

I'm not up on this, but its almost like each OS is trying to use a different cluster size or sector size to read the filesystem.

Edited by LoneCrusader
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Try repeating the two tests. Windows may have added a hidden file or folder in between the first two tests.

Checked them again, same result. I have both 98 and XP set to show all hidden/system files.

Also the numbers seem too perfect... 4096 and 8192...

I'm not up on this, but its almost like each OS is trying to use a different cluster size or sector size to read the filesystem.

Using a different Sector or Cluster size would make the Drive unuseable.

Try running SCANDISK on the Drive and repeat the tests. I had a corrupt key that reported 300K difference between XP and 98SE.

An empty FAT32 Drive should only have 1 Cluster allocated for it's Root Directory, which in your case is 4KB.

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