Unable to recover anything with damaged drive

[redhawk]

I had a problem with my M2 memory card last night I was testing my new 4-1 card reader from Pound Land and it messed it up during a read bench test.

Now I wasn't expect much for a Pound but I was shocked at just how fast it trashed my card so if you're considering buy one I would avoid them like the plague.

Fortunately I didn't have anything important I had already upgraded my M2 card for my phone with the same files included.

Since I was unable to open files via my other M2 card reader (Sony) I decided to put Recuva to the test and see if I could recover anything.

 

Well I tried and it failed instantly even in deep scan mode: "Unable to read boot sector"

 

Now I thought Recuva was this amazing program that could recover files even hard drives that have been formatted so why would a boot sector error be such a big deal??

 

I decided to investigate just how bad the damage was and using a program called WinHex I was able to view the entire drive.

Interestingly the root directory structure was intact I could see the file names perfectly including the ones I had previously deleted.

So it seems to me that if Recuva ignores the boot sector error it should be able to recover my files right?? or perhaps that's asking for too much.

 

To further my tests I formatted my M2 card using quick format, Recuva will now perform deep scan but claims to have found nothing.

 

I suppose in all fairness other similar recovery tools including WinHex seemed unwilling to recover files too the only program that I’ve had success with was "Flash Memory Toolkit" even after using quick format.

 

I guess this begs the question, will Recuva support flash drives with damaged boot sectors??

 

or ask user what type of file system existed on the damaged drive??

 

Also blindly searching for fragments the match file headers rather than simple looking for file entries (the same as Flash Memory Toolkit) would be another useful feature.

 

Richard S.