No partition on USB Flash Drive?
- by Skytunnel
A friend gave me a corrupted USB memory stick to try recovery data from. But I've had some unusual results, so thought I'd share to see if anyone is familiar with this problem...
First off I just tried opening from my own PC. Windows prompted to Format the drive, which I of course declined
Downloaded TestDisk to anaylsis the drive. And right away I noticed something strange, on the listed drives it comes up as
Disk /dev/sdc - 6144 B - USB Flash Drive
That's right, the first USB flash drive smaller than a floppy disk!?
Moving on anyway... first anaylsis comes up with:
Partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55
TestDisk's Quick Search gave no results, moved on to Deeper Search:
No partition found or selected for recovery
This left me stumped. I tired a couple of other programs with no success
I did manage to get a backup image, but it was just as small as TestDisk indicated, so nothing of use on it
After a few hours trying various suggestions from other sources, I gave in and just tried formatting the drive. But returned the message:
Windows was unable to complete the format.
From googling that, the suggestion was to delete the partition. But there is no partition to delete in this case.
most recently I've tried formatting from cmd, and got this result:
Format D: /FS:FAT32
The type of the file system is RAW
The new file system is FAT32
Verifying 0M
11 bad sectors were encountered during the format. These sectors cannot be guaranteed to have been cleaned
The volume is too small for FAT32
Anyone got any suggestions?
UPDATE: As per suggestion from @Karen, I tried running a CLEAN from DISKPART, results as follows
DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be preformed because of an I/O device error.
