Re: Salvaging data from USB flash disk

"OtisUsenet" <otis_usenet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks for all the help and pointers, Henrik. Unfortunately, I am
still unable to mount the copy of the disk. :(

What if you try to look on the image with xxd? Something like:

xxd /tmp/lana-disk | less

Does it seem to contain any data at all? Are you able to recognize any
strings? You could try:

strings /tmp/lana-disk

To see if the disk image contains any of your text data.

I'm not sure what file system type was on the disk. My mount thinks
it's not vfat, and it looks like I don't have fat* support, so I can't
use -t fat32, for example.

Fat12, fat16 and fat32 could all be seen as different versions of fat
where the difference is how big file systems they are able to handle.
Fat12 is still used for floppies, fat16 had to be replaced when harddisks
got bigger than 2GB and fat32 has a file system size limit of 2TB.

Vfat was a backwards compatible extension to fat which made it possible to
have file names that was longer than 8+3. If you mount a fat partition as
vfat you will use that extension, if you mount it as msdos all file names
will be limited to 8+3.

(I'm looking at another, working flash disk now, and it uses vfat, so I
assume the corrupt one also used vfat)

Most flash disks do use vfat unless someone has put another file system on
them.

Is the only way I can get to this data through mounting the disk first?

You could try my suggestions with xxd and strings also.

Could I recover anything with Partition Magic or some such tool? (I'm
wondering if P.M. might still be able to see the flash disk and let me
copy its data onto a new valid partition on, say, a regular HDD)

It seems as if you would need a tool that is able to recreate a partition
table. However, it is probably not much hope for such a tool to succeed.

regards Henrik
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