Unknown Partition Table on USB Thumb Drive
Hey all-
My friend gave me a flash drive with some important files on it that one day didn't work with his windows box. Upon plugging in the thumb drive, Windows gives a "you must format this disk before it can be used" message. I tried running a data recovery program (Easeus) on it but didn't have great results- only recovered some .wav files, a few .avi files and a .exe- none of which were very important, so I figure'd I'd try to mount it in Linux and possibly see the rest of the filesystem.
The thumbdrive is a 2GB Lexar JD Firefly
I plugged in the thumb drive and it is picked up by the system, but I can't access it. Here is the output of lsusb
Code:
[root[ at ]colbalt ~]# lsusb
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 045e:00dd Microsoft Corp.
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0461:4d15 Primax Electronics, Ltd Dell Optical Mouse
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 05dc:a731 Lexar Media, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Output of dmesg
Code:
usb 2-2: USB disconnect, address 3
usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=05dc, idProduct=a731
usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-2: Product: JD FireFly
usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Lexar
usb 2-2: SerialNumber: AA04015200012313
usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 4
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access Lexar JD FireFly 1100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 3915776 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 GB/1.86 GiB)
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: unknown partition table
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
Trying to mount the thumb drive doesn't work :-\ When I ran the data recovery tool, the FS was detected as FAT32 which isn't surprising.
Code:
[root[ at ]colbalt ~]# ls /mnt
usbdrive
[root[ at ]colbalt ~]# ls /mnt/usbdrive/
[root[ at ]colbalt ~]# mount -t vfat /dev/sg2 /mnt/usbdrive/
mount: /dev/sg2 is not a block device
[root[ at ]colbalt ~]# mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdrive/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
[root[ at ]colbalt ~]# dmesg | tail
FAT: invalid media value (0x0f)
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdb.
[ EDIT ]
Tried running chkdsk on my Windows box...
Code:
C:\Users\Johnrocs>CHKDSK E: /F /R
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
Trying a couple more data recovery tools, namely "Zero Assumption Recovery" which supposedly can recover from RAW FS, then going to try CGSecurity's TestDisk. Will post results later...
[ /EDIT ]
Any help here would be greatly appreciated, thanks a bunch!
John
