Mass cut-and-pasted over my data from a borrowed USB memory stick to a brand new one this morning. When I tried to eject it normally, my computer insisted it was still in use. I wanted to get moving out of the house, so just told the computer to close any open files and eject it by force... bad decision. Now my computer says the new memory stick is corrupt and needs to be reformatted. And my borrowed memory stick was working so well that I completely forgot about backing up my data recently... yup, (another) bad decision.
I'm currently trying to recover data from the new memory stick with Recuva, but Recuva in advanced mode (the wizard keeps ignoring the almost 30,000 files and just comes up with two zipped files I don't really care about) won't work with the new memory stick as-is--when I try to select it for scanning, my computer tells me (again) that I have to reformat the drive to do anything with it.
My question: Should I reformat and try to recover files from that point on? Or would reformatting lower my chances of recovering most of my data?
Thanks for reading and any advice you can offer.
Hi ririkko, and welcome to the forum.
Two things to begin with.
First. Yes, you could do a "Quick Format" of the stick which will initialize the file system but will not delete the files. Then scan with Recuva with "Scan for non deleted files" selected in "Options\Actions".
But I'm puzzled when you say that Recuva is ignoring 30,000 files and found 2 zipped files when you also say that it won't work and asks for the stick to be formatted.
Second. Do you still have the borrowed drive and has it been used since you moved the files off it. Although "moved" off that drive the files will still actually be on it although the space they occupy will have been made available for use.
You could scan that drive with Recuva.
But before you do anything, how big is the faulty stick? If a nominal size and you have the drive space, you could make a backup "Image" of that faulty stick, as it is now with USB Image Tool, and if the format and recover does not yield positive results, you could "restore" the "Image" to it and try to repair it. That's a possibility.
USB Image Tool: (Freeware)
I would help you as best I can with that if you needed it.