Dead thumb drive revival?

Sometimes, not always though, you can try booting into LINUX (of some flavor - I use Ubuntu) and see if it will recognize the drive. You can run any distro of LINUX from an ISO version on a DVD. It give you full functionality without causing ANY harm to your current Windows machine. It runs from a RAMDisk, but it appears as a full version of LINUX. Before I moved most of my computing to Ubuntu (now version 18.04LTS) I had several DVDs to use.

Bill

crazytrain said:

Threw it into the freezer overnight and it actually showed up, only as a cd rom. Soon as I tried to right click on it...poof. Nothing.

Guess I'll keep it, toss it outside this winter when it's below zero and see if it finally remembers what it really is.

Click to expand...

They heat up really quick when used. If you can find dry ice, you can put it in a baggie and use an USB extension cable to lay the drive on the dry ice. I doubt you will be able to get any data though but I've used that trick to recover pictures from hard drives and memory cards. On memory cards, I use RescuePRO Deluxe to read the cards. It might work with flash drives.

William

Moral here is always have a backup of the backup, saved me more than once.

Yeah, flash drives are good for moving files from one computer to another. (sneakernet). You can get a 1 terabyte portable hard drive for around $40. Much better for making backups.

William

Disc recovery software:

https://www.easeus.com/

I've used their partition move and resize tools, but have heard their recovery tools are good too. It might be worth a try, but if the thumb drive died completely it'll be impossible to recover anything because they work like EEROMs which eventually kills the memory cells in the ROM.