Flash Drive Will Not Mount - May Be Corrupt

[Sinsinnati]

I HAVE to get a document from a specific location on a USB flash drive that may be corrupted. I've been given some hope from Google searches which turn up blogs that describe copying files from hopeless external media with Linux. But they're either too specific to the hardware in the example for me to follow or too complicated for me to understand.

Could someone PLEASE offer whatever help? At the least, someone could probably walk me through some command line prompts to verify that the device is COMPLETELY unreachable. The only copy of a 15-page paper is still on this little piece of junk.

I'm using 9.10, Karmic.

[D-cat]

Well, give us some specifics. What happens when you plug in the USB drive?

Also, shortly after doing so, please post the outputs of the following commands:

dmesg | tail

sudo fdisk -l
(that's FDISK -L)

If you believe the device really is damaged, we may be better off to take an image of the device and work with that instead of floundering with flash device with hot spots. We'll cross that bridge in a bit if prudent.
Thank you.

[Sinsinnati]

Thanks, D-cat. I got it working last night before I went to bed.