Having trouble getting data from thumb drive

[Slickrick214]

My cousing just got back from Disney Word and she saved a bunch of pictures to a USB thumb drive. When she got back she installed the TD into the drive and it keeps getting error messages. She gave it to me to look at and I can't figure out what is wrong with it. I took it apart to look at the actual PCB board, chip and soldering and as far as I can tell everything looks ok. When I try to open the thumb drive file I get a message that says: "You need to format in Disk J before you can use it" I don't want to do that because if I do it will lose anything on there right? Then when I click cancel it says " J is not accesible the drive does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted?

So what do you guys think the problem is? Do you think there is any possible way to retrieve the data on the drive?

 

[Hawkeye22]

It sounds like the drive is dead, but you can try recuva.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[Slickrick214]

I'll give it a try but I'm not to hopefull that I'll be able to get the data back.

 

[inzone]

It could be that when you cousin thought she was putting pictures on it she really wasn't because the thumb drive was not initially formatted. So it could be that there is nothing on the drive and you will have to try some of the recovery software to see if there was anything on the TD. Recuve is good and I have used it before also this is a good free software to use;

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

[Slickrick214]

Thats what I thought to but here's where I'm unsure. You know when you click on the drive and go to properties it gives you the pink/blue pie chart showing space used. Well this thumb drive is coming up all blue meaning its full. But under the percent's it says

Used- 0%
Free- 0%

That doesnt make sense. Its a 2 gig drive so it should be 2048 mb used 0 free.

 

[inzone]

Here's something that you can think about , when you format a drive it does not erase any data it only makes it so you can write over it but the data is still there untill you either write over it or you erase it with a software program designed to do so.
This means in a worst case senario if you want to partition and format the drive you can and the data that is there will not be erased and can be recovered with one of the software programs that were listed here in this posting.
In the meantime you can attempt to recover any data that may be on there with whatever software that you can use.

 

[Slickrick214]

Best answer selected by Slickrick214.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Was recuva able to get the pictures back for you?