Recovery "damaged" USB pen drive

[Andrew Jarrett]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 5:38 PM, Hector Barrios Molano <hebm12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody
> A friend give me a "damaged" USB pen drive to fix it because in Windows show
> "insert disc on unit *", when I insert this pen drive on Kubuntu, kubuntu
> doesn't recognize it, in contrast whit my USB pen drive, I don't know why?
>
> I went to /dev/ and search my pen drive in sdc1 and I found two files sdc
> and sdc1, beside these was a file names sdb I guess that that is of the
> "damaged" pen drive.
>
> Then I wrote on console dmesg and it show me:
>
> [16073.639128] usb 5-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address
> 19
> [16073.771574] usb 5-7: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
> [16073.782906] scsi16 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
> [16073.789187] usb-storage: device found at 19
> [16073.789193] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
> [16078.784584] usb-storage: device scan complete
> [16078.785569] scsi 16:0:0:0: Direct-Access     USBest   USB2FlashStorage
> 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
> [16078.801066] sd 16:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [16078.801121] sd 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
>
> This is the part where the system recognize the "damaged" pen drive
>
>
> Someone can help me to recovery the data inside the pen drive, is it
> possible?, to later format it, if it's necessary and possible.
>
> Thanks everyone and I hope you understand me and can help me.


I have never had to do this, but I assume it would be something like this:
1) Mount pen drive (maybe read-only?)
2) Run a command like the following:
dd noerror if=/dev/sdb1 of=/path/to/saved/image

This should capture an image from your pen drive ("if") and save it to
("of").  If it encounters read errors, it will continue ("noerror").

Again, I haven't really had to do this before, so you may want to do
some research on "dd".

***** Whoa, okay.  I just remembered this little thing called
"ddrescue".  This is probably what you need.  You can install it with
"sudo apt-get install gddrescue" and read about it by typing
"info://ddrescue" into Konqueror's location bar. **********

Andrew



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