Help! Does anyone know of anyone who / company that can recover information from a damaged flash drive? It won’t open up on my laptop and my husband has tried too but it won’t open up.
There is a company in Ireland that does it but I’m not happy sending my USB stick there in case it gets lost in the post.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
We had a rescue done by a local company that advertises as a repair and restore service. Have a look locally.
I’ll try to look - but we live miles away from the nearest city… Thanks!
Not in a city, but a small entreprise that covers local villages. Rural France needs IT experts too !
Search recuperation des données and your nearest town
Where are you located?
Depend a bit whether it is a software failure (corrupt file system) or hardware failure.
If the former then Testdisk - Partition Recovery and File Undelete may well recover them for you.
If it is a hardware failure then it might not be possibleto retrieve any data, but you will need a specialist somewhere.
Google suggests several options for recovering data from a damaged flash drive
https://x.com/przemek87394560/status/1819619881794302273?s=46&t=o9Nx0mAMJLhojSQm4D-EJg
It looks easy enough - just give it a go, what could possibly go wrong!!!
In the Correze, nearest town is Tulle, next is Brive de la Gaillarde
The laptop doesn’t show the disc at all… we wonder if something is broken in the flash drive. We’ve tried different ‘ports’ on our laptops but it doesn’t show up 
Do you know anyone with a Mac? I’ve seen a flash drive which was “invisible” to my PC show up on my Mac.
I will ask a friend who does have a Mac. Thanks!
If there’s no chime when you plug it in and the drive does not show up in device manager it’s somewhat more likely it is an electrical fault with the drive rather than simply data corruption.
I’ d make sure that they still work - one failure mode for the drive will be a shorted power supply and that could easily damage the port (it will blow the polyfuse - not a difficult fid but you need someone who can actually work on the PCB).
It’s a long way from the best drive repair video that I’ve ever seen - but it does illustrate that modern thumb drives are highly integrated without many separate components to replace, typically a flash chip and controller only (I can’t find any but would not be surprised to find integrated flash and controller in a single device these days).
So, next question - did you have a backup of the files on the drive?
I think we all know the answer to that one! 
I’m assuming your using Windows here. Is it that it doesn’t show up as a drive in explorer, or have you looked in the taskbar at the little picture of. USB disk ? If that’s not there, then definitely an electrical problem. However, I had this issue once and all that was needed was to clean the contacts inside the plug housing on the drive. I used a small cotton bud and isopropyl alcohol but a 70% alcohol would probably do. It’s worth a try, but do leave it to dry thoroughly before trying it.
Not clear whether any offer data recovery services - and if the data is important it is best to stick with specialists as, sometimes, you only get one shot.
Google “service récupération de données” to find companies in France which offer data recovery.
It tends to be expensive.
As suggested in post no 3! But he didn’t seem to want to use a postal service.
Sorry 
I was going to do it but unfortunately the USB didn’t work when I decided to do a back-up. Sod’s law!
