Unfortunately, the volume of production in China cannot guarantee the high quality of the products. It is clear that if the electronics manufacturer is eminent and takes special care of quality, then we can still talk about a low percentage of marriage. But even if all this is true, then failures are still not excluded. A striking example of this is the failure of flash memory with damage to the file system and data loss. It is clear that data recovery is of much greater interest to the vast majority of users than the performance of a flash drive. In this article, we will consider which flash drive recovery program is suitable for your case. Fortunately, the choice of such software is very large.
After detecting a malfunction, a program for recovering data on a flash drive may be useful first. It is necessary to try to recover lost data with its help. This can be done if the computer even detects a storage device. For formats SD, Compact Flash, MMC, Smart Media, and so on, there is a series of utilities F-Recovery, focused on working with images. To work with other documents on flash media of the usual format, there are universal programs Getdataback and RecoverMyFiles. Some kind of program to recover information from a flash drive is likely to help. Quality depends on the degree of damage to the file system and on the features of the heuristic program. If the data saved from the media does not suit you, you can try several utilities, perhaps some of them will succeed (due to a few other work algorithms) to save what was not found earlier.
After recovering the information, consider resuscitation of the flash drive. Of course, it is better to just buy a carrier of a high-quality vendor (Kingstone, Transcend) and forget about this problem, but for enthusiasts who are interested in messing around with computer accessories, this information can be useful.
First, we clarify that the specifics of the recovery depend on the flash drive chip. The flash drive recovery program depends on the brand of controller used. Almost each of the major manufacturers of flash memory has released a special utility to restore the functionality of a flash card, but there are also universal solutions. First you need to diagnose the cause of the breakdown. This can be done using the Flashnul utility, which diagnoses flash drives of almost any type and, in some cases, allows you to fix software errors that impede proper functioning. Another example of such "omnivorous" solutions is EzRecover, which allows you to "find" an undetectable flash drive. The program should be used only if you do not value the data on the USB flash drive - they are irretrievably lost. For the same purpose, there is a U-Storage tool program that works through its virtual controller (to install it, you need to use the drivers from the program kit).
Now let's talk about the solutions that exist for solving this problem with vendors. Most often, a flash drive recovery program simply formats the media correctly. An example is a utility from Sony Corporation - Memory Stick Formatter. Will return to any type of Memory Stick card the original size. It is also worth highlighting the iFormat utility, which has the ability to format a huge number of flash controllers. The purpose is to return the real volume to fake drives manufactured under the brand name of the company.
The specified volume of the article is not enough to list all the flash recovery products of all manufacturers. Here are some of them: AlcorMP (Transcend), Seitec USB Flash Utility, Seitec USB Flash Utility, PCLock, AH220 LFormat Utility, Format Utility For Adata Flash Disk. Each of the utilities is positioned as a flash drive recovery program suitable only for a specific controller.
In conclusion, let us take a small digression. The fact is that often inexpensive drives have a much smaller volume than declared. This is due to the desire of an underground Chinese manufacturer to reduce costs as much as possible. That is, the size of the partition can be seen by means of Windows as declared, but in reality the volume can be less than 2 - 3 times! Therefore, we urge you not to save on external flash drives. There is also a universal utility for determining the true amount of memory - PortFree Production Program.