USB Flash Drive file problems

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weelzSA

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Hi,

Friend of mine has a flash drive with some very important documents on it. When he connects to a PC or Mac, the system reads the flash drive and shows used and free space available but when you open the flash drive folder, it says it is empty.

I have made sure they aren't hidden ect. Anyone have any advice on how I can access these documents or some software that I can use to retrieve the documents?

Please this is really urgent.
 
weelzSA said:
Hi,

Friend of mine has a flash drive with some very important documents on it. When he connects to a PC or Mac, the system reads the flash drive and shows used and free space available but when you open the flash drive folder, it says it is empty.

I have made sure they aren't hidden ect. Anyone have any advice on how I can access these documents or some software that I can use to retrieve the documents?

Please this is really urgent.
Click to expand...
Are they not perhaps encrypted by having had the Bitlocker feature turned on when they were created?
 
I believe a virus has change the properties of the files to hidden.
Change the view setting to display hidden files and folders as well as system files under your windows explorer.
 
LaraC said:
I believe a virus has change the properties of the files to hidden.
Change the view setting to display hidden files and folders as well as system files under your windows explorer.
Click to expand...

He's already done that - it doesn't seem to be the problem.

OP, tell your friend to NEVER keep important files in only one place (especially a flash drive that can easily be lost). Use backups and if possible, use a cloud storage solution like Dropbox.
 
There are two options, Hidden files and folders and protected system files.
 
weelzSA said:
Sorry but could you explain? Not 100% sure what you mean.
Click to expand...
Certain versions of Windows had a feature called Bitlocker that automatically encrypted your files if it was set to do so. Used in Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise.

It might also just be a standard security setting where only the owner and authorised users can access the documents.

Try EaseUS Partition Magic to access the drive and Explore the partition. Also use the Check Partition feature.
 
It is how flash drives die. It reports size, but on reading the first bad sector firmware hangs.
It might be still possible to copy sector by sector and do recovery from the image. Use fake disk utility to find out location of first error, replug and and skip this area. Use RMPrep by example.
 
Try change attributes via command line.

Something along the lines of attrib -r -h -s /s /d e:\*.*
 
Managed to recover all files with EaseUS Data Recovery so thats good news.

They going to be testing all files and make sure they are still working.

Thanks for all the advice.
 
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