Toshiba products absolutely stink....

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 11:52 am

My 16GB USB memory stick or thumb drive became irrevocably corrupted today due to a bad overwrite by my laptop as it was saving to the drive and so I lost close to a hundred hours of work I'd been putting into my books several of which were supposed to be getting published in the near future but that wont be happening now. As soon as I realized what had happened I attempted to recover the lost media using a file recovery program called Recuva by Piriform but the program was unsuccessful at reading the corrupted drive so the files could not be retrieved.I even tried using some manual retrieval methods but all of my efforts were in vain and the sad part is I don't have these files backed up anywhere else which I should have and now I feel like a complete moron as I should have been practicing what I have been preaching about backing up your back-ups to prevent this kind of senseless data loss.So I can say farewell to three vacations worth of pictures, movies and other content because the drive is completely trashed at this point and wont even let me access it to reformat it for later re-use so I've got to go out and by another drive and start from scratch.A cloud backup service would have been very useful to me today but I've been putting off registering for one because I just don't trust the free versions out there a lot of them are really free because you either end up donating some of your Hard Drive space to be used by the program manufacturer or you find out your only on a free limited trial and can't actually back up and real amount of data.I want to get an external hard drive to use for my backups but they are rather pricey right now I'm hoping to catch one on sale around Thanks-Giving for ten or fifteen dollars at my local Wal*Mart.I know what your thinking why didn't I keep the files on my computer and just use the thumb drive as the back up and that's what it was originally for but I lost my main copies of everything a while back due to an issue with a faulty system update and just never extracted the files back onto the computer from the external drive which I am now regretting... Ah well when life hands you lemons you might as well make lemonade.

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 5:44 pm

Just discovered something else got to looking at the effected drive with my partition manager and noticed that the drive was switched to a master boot record or MBR file system which has made the drive inaccessible to the computer, whatever happened when the drive was corrupted really messed it up because the computer is reading as a MBR file system instead of FAT-32 system which is what its supposed to be using.I tried converting the drive back to FAT-32 from MBR with no success because the drive is inaccessible at this point and none of the file recovery tools I have used can even start the drive up to check it.This drive is garbage now and what gets me is that I wasn't having any issues with it and then the computer runs a system update last night and the drive disconnects and then reconnects automatically displaying an error message that the drive failed to load and then the computer attempted to download a driver update which caused this whole mess.I've uninstalled the device driver for this unit and re-installed it several times and even deleted the whole list of drivers and controllers associated with it and nothing works none of the suggested fixes have done anything for me.

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Wed Jul 29, 2015 2:38 pm

I'm trying one final program called Find and Mount its supposed to look for hidden, damaged or missing partitions to make data recovery from a damaged or malfunctioning external memory source easier so I'm going to let the scan finish it says it may take an hour or more and when its done I'll see what it was able to find.

Keg · Post by **Keg** » Thu Jul 30, 2015 7:25 am

I would try a commercial file recovery service. 100 hours is too much to lose.It happens though. Sometimes it is necessary to start over.

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Thu Jul 30, 2015 12:25 pm

@Keg, yeah 100hrs is a lot to loose but unfortunately after exhausting all of my options with data recovery software I decided to pop the case off of the drive to see what the transistor nodes looked like and they are all burnt out which means the only way to recover the data would be to take the NAND chip off of the effected drive and mount it to a new mother board so that the files it contains would be accessible.As I don't have the tools necessary to take the NAND off the burnt out motherboard and mount it on a new one so the files are gone.I did a search of this particular drive to find out if this problem is specific to it or if its a general issue and from what I've gathered its a very specific issue with the brand in question because they are using very cheap parts they don't handle extended use very well and tend to just burn out because the parts are so unstable which really stinks...