I too had a problem with my USB Drive not being recognised.
I had the previous days spent about 25 hours on a Uni assignment. I needed the data. Spent many hours looking on the net and trialing several programs.
The end result a program called 'Diskdigger' did it for me. The word document once recovered had to be opened in wordpad, and then I cut & pasted back into a word document. deleted the word programming codes. and had to reformat my assignment, but it's back and saved my hair from falling out