Corrupted files on USB Flash Drive?

[Nigel Molesworth]

My son has done some college work at home and saved it directly to a brand
new 4GB FAT32 USB flash drive, which he Ejected before removal.

Now he is at college, and can't open the files. The directory structure is
visible, but when he tries to open a file (for example a PNG), Windows
reports the file is corrupted. He has emailed on of the files to me, and I
get the same result.

All the utilities I can find seem to focus on lost or deleted files, not
corrupted ones.

Any suggestions?

 

[Malke]

My son has done some college work at home and saved it directly to a brand
new 4GB FAT32 USB flash drive, which he Ejected before removal.

Now he is at college, and can't open the files. The directory structure is
visible, but when he tries to open a file (for example a PNG), Windows
reports the file is corrupted. He has emailed on of the files to me, and I
get the same result.

All the utilities I can find seem to focus on lost or deleted files, not
corrupted ones.

Any suggestions?

Tell your son it's a hard way to learn the important lesson of never saving
files directly to a USB thumb drive. The files are corrupted and are lost. The
good data has been ruined and there's nothing he can do but start over. And
save his work to the hard drive first and then copy it to a thumb drive.

Malke

 

[Malke]

You can try to retrieve the data with Easeus ( 'Easeus Data Recovery
Wizard :: How-To Geek Reviews'
(http://www.howtogeek.com/reviews/easeus-data-recovery-wizard/) ).

The problem that the OP has is not that the files were deleted but that they
are corrupted. Data recovery software will work in the first instance but not
be useful in the second (the OP's situation). IOW, if you save a file called
MyNovel.doc and overwrite it with a blank document of the same name or the
file has become corrupted, data recovery software will recover MyNovel.doc
but it will not magically have become a document that has all the original
data intact.

Malke