recovering from flash drive

[genik]

My flash drive went crazy yesterday and i have no access to my files. When i insert it, i get the message saying that this drive isnt formatted do u want to format it now?
I have tryied to use partition magic, and ontrack safe recovery but with little results. There are some Illustrator files (.ai) that cannot be found. What are my options so that apart from recovering to be able also to repair files or the stucture of the flash drive and maybe i can see the files back, i know that theyre there!:D

[Drazan]

Quite commonly flash drives are initially formatted FAT32 and if you are using winXP, a NTSF format, it's been known to reject drives even if you've been using them for quite sometime. See if there's any other computer that can read the drive. You can also try to "DOS" prompt to the drive and see if it sees data there. Though if you are using win XP the dos is a suedo dos that may not work.

If you have used any special characters in naming of your files, this can also cause that message. Special characters such as / * & ^ % !

Or it could be that the partition failed - drive is completely full, etc.

Norton Ghost has been known to grab data off "unseen disks". If you google there's a few utilities for "flash drive recovery".

I'll also ask my roommate on this. He's done a few recovery disk and drive things before and may have something more specific.

[rickself]

^ Yep ^

Try different computers. We get a lot of jobs in now on thumb or flash drives for the PC. I usually have to try a second or third machine before I can get the darn thing to come up. 99% of the time they will come up on the G5 but I prefer to keep them on the same platform.

[genik]

tried it on a G5, but nothing, even there it asks me to initialise the drive, in windows smae thing, it askss me to format!