TR Forums

I need to access word files from a memorex travel drive 1gb. I have used this drive before, but it is saying that the drive needs to be formated. If I fromated it will delete all files. How do access my word files without fomating the flash drive?

You are probably limited to two options, unfortunately.

First would be to recover the file from your most recent backup.

Second would be to pay a professional data recovery service to get your data back.

There are software packages you can buy which will attempt to automatically recover your data but your mileage will vary with these. Personally, I would avoid them.

If the data is very important, I would unplug the USB stick straight away to avoid any further possible damage to the data!

I forgot if Recuva can access drives that don't have a drive letter, but you can try it out anyway: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

If you are confident the thumb drive is not infected, try a different PC or different usb port.

Depends on what is wrong with it, but windows can be notoriously difficult with say a corrupted partition table / MBR or similar. Some of those softwares can usually rewrite or detect and fix only the partition table / MBR keeping the rest of the partition intact. So what you need is a decent partition utility that can look at it on a lower level then the standard explorer. Although flash drivers can be harder to fix then normal drivers, so if you have backup, I would advice going that route first.

Whether it works depends on whether or not your USB stick is physically damaged, but I've had very good results with Zero Assumption Recovery:
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

The free version can scan your drive and tell you what's recoverable, but IIRC you have to buy a copy to actually recover anything. Their site claims the free version will recover pictures and videos from flash media, however.

If you don't want to or can't afford to buy a recovery program, you could try something like Recuva, which isn't as good but might work:
https://www.piriform.com/recuva
----------
edit: ZAR's website says "Only (up to) four folders can be recovered in the demo version of our data recovery software." so it should work for your purpose.

At the end of the day, the drive may be toast and the files unrecoverable. So if this file is very important, you need to start thinking about how to re-create it or recover a copy (even if it is older) from somewhere else.

You should NEVER have only one copy of irreplaceable data.