nice article in linux-journal
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8366
How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by GNU/Linux
June 14th, 2005 by Collin Park in
* HOWTOs
Would SUSE and fsck be able to recover the data in a usable way?
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My friend's brother had a 512MB Lexar Media Jumpdrive Pro USB drive that became corrupted after using it with Windows 2000. His IT department was able to get back some but not all of the file contents, but without any file names. On his own, he tried some recovery utilities, but all failed. Using a typical Linux distro--in this case SuSE 8.0--however, it wasn't hard to recover almost all of the data from the drive along with the filenames and to burn a CD-ROM of the contents.
USB Drive Ruined by Windows
Here's what I heard about the data loss:
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:06:03 -0700
Subject: USB
... My USB drive is a
Lexar Media USB Jumpdrive Pro 2.0 (512 MB). I was working
on it in a computer with Windows 2000 and logged off before
ejecting the drive. Next time when I tried to use it,
it showed up as a Removable drive rather than the usual
Lexar Media drive and when I tried to open it, it said the
drive was not formatted; and under Properties, 0 bytes free
and used space and file system "RAW"
According to Lexar tech support, there is a bug with
Windows 2000 (that MS never bothered to fix) and can corrupt
the drive when it is removed without proper eject. They
recommend EasyRecovery Pro for data recovery which did
allow me to recover some files (> 500) using their RAW data
recovery program (all other tool failed because usually
said "no recognizable file on disc"). Unfortunately,
all the file names are lost and some files are gone.
The big questions was "can Linux read the drive?" A Web search of "linux usb jumpdrive pro" gave me hope that my kernel, 2.4.18 on SuSE 8.0, would recognize the drive in question. So, as root, I typed:
# tail -f /var/log/messages
and plugged the drive into a USB socket. Here's what appeared; I removed "Aug 5 01:32:15 linux kernel:" from each line below):
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 1313
Vendor: LEXAR Model: JUMPDRIVE PRO Rev: 0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 1001952 512-byte hdwr sectors (513 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: sda1
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 4
USB Mass Storage support registered.
also according to one of the responders can try
http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/
