Recovery "damaged" USB pen drive

[Jonas Norlander]

2008/6/2 Andrew Jarrett <jarrett.andrew at gmail.com>:
> 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
>

Hi

The first thing to do is to make a backup of the drive to a disk image
so you can work with it in case if something goes wrong. To make the
backup i would use GNU ddrescue as Andrew suggested (there is also a
dd_rescue tool but i have not used it) but don't mount the partition.
If the partition table is damage i would use testdisk (it has worked
very well form me to recover FAT/NTFS partitions) or gpart. To recover
the data/files i would try PhotoRec, Foremost or Magic Rescue.

Good luck

/ Jonas