Usb stick needs formatting – recovery of data possible?

well the title says it, my friend put his usb stick into the pc today with all his coursework in and it says it needs formatting. is there anyway he can get the work off before formatting? he needs to work quite quickly as deadlines are coming in a few days. thanks for any help!
Answer #1
You can try using Tune Up Utilities’s “undelete tool” and also the “disk discovery tool.” I used the undelete tool on a corrupted USB stick not too long ago
Answer #2
First of all, does the drive not work on just one computer? Go back to the one that it last worked on and see if it works from there. If it does, copy what is important off of it and re-format the drive as FAT or FAT32. These are the most compatible file systems. If the drive was formatted in NTFS, then only windows 2000 and above will be able to read it. If the computer that he plugged it into was Win98 or WinME, etc. It would complain that the disc needed formatting.
If you can’t get it to work in a computer that it did before, you can try and use a file recovery program to recover files from the drive. Or you can open the drive in a hex editor and see if there is anything usable on it at all. If it is a report or something that is mainly text, you can search for some key terms to find where the file is, then copy the data somewhere else. WinHex is an excellent hex editor that has options to recover files that have been deleted, etc. It also has an image backup option that will make an exact copy of the entire drive and save it somewhere else. You can search for WinHex here and find it
Answer #3
thanks
Answer #4
chor k bachay gandoo

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Answer #5
I have a similar problem
I accidently deleted my work on my USB stick but i need to get it back ASAP
I tried a data recovery software which got back my word document files but for some reason, when i open them it gives me some options saying “Select enconding that makes your document readable”
Then, when i open with the option “Windows Default” or other options, i get some weird codes coming up with about 150 pages
Somebody please HELP ME!?!!??!?!
Answer #6
unfortunatley flash drive holds data in none volatile memory not magnetic so is fragile and so is easy to corrupt and can be very hard to recover
Answer #7
do you know a way to recover?
Answer #8
hamish72 replied: unfortunatley flash drive holds data in none volatile memory not magnetic so is fragile and so is easy to corrupt and can be very hard to recover
do you know a way to recover?
Answer #9
another quetion i: how can i get a pdf file back from a usb stick as the one i need has been replaced with an empty form.