A friend of mine at the work I used to work at had a problem with his mother's USB Flash Drive. The problem was not superficial, it was a physical defect of the drive. Upon examination of the drive I found that it would intermittently work for about 10-20 seconds and then die again. So I must have inserted the flash drive in 40 times while doing a drive mirror with "ddrescue," a Linux utility to create a map out of a full drive duplication of a media source. Basically it can map out any type of drive using a combination of the "dd" utility with the expanded functionality of "ddrescue." If it comes to a dead spot on the drive it will skip to some place else on the drive, scanning the whole drive for anything that is recoverable. It can read the data forwards or backwards to retrieve data by whatever means. It is like a puzzle solver, copying all data that can be copied into a raw data file. It continually hammers the drive to copy anything that can be copied and when it all seems to be recovered you just leave ddrescue to continually hammer the drive some more to make up a fully complete map of all the data on the drive. If one part of the drive absolutely can't be recovered it just replaces those non-recoverable spots with zeros or something of that nature. Because her drive had physical problems and not just some minor problem, I needed to insert and reinsert the drive many times over to get the drive to respond for a few seconds and then redo that procedure. It probably did a heck of a job on my USB port, but in the end I recovered every single block of data and got paid some money for my time. I heard that his mother was very exceptionally happy for the results, thanks be to the Linux operating system and the GNU Project utilities.

Once the ddresue made the data map it was a simple use of the "dd" utility to "drive duplicate" the raw image onto a fresh USB stick. This took about ninety minutes for ddrescue's functions and it took less than 10 minutes to use dd to copy it to the new drive, and cash in the pocket, fun times. If I were to do it again I would have inserted the failed drive into a USB hub so that if my USB port got damaged it would be a removable one and not the one that was part of the computer itself.

Some hints and tricks from my geekery,
-warmfuzzy

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE, rAmsgAtE, uK. bbs.erb.pw (700:100/37)

Hello warmfuzzy!

A friend of mine at the work I used to work at had a problem with his mother's USB Flash Drive. The problem was not superficial, it was a
physical defect of the drive. Upon examination of the drive I found that it..

[...]

Once the ddresue made the data map it was a simple use of the "dd" utility
to "drive duplicate" the raw image onto a fresh USB stick. This took about ninety minutes for ddrescue's functions and it took less than 10 minutes to use dd to copy it to the new drive, and cash in the pocket, fun times. ...

What was the brand, model, and size of the usb drive? I've had
intermittent problems with a couple my drives: Kingston Cruizer
and Nexxtech, both 16GB and larger.
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: End Of The Line BBS - endofthelinebbs.com (700:100/16)

A friend of mine at the work I used to work at had a problem with his mother's USB Flash Drive. The problem was not superficial, it was a physical defect of the drive. Upon examination of the drive I found tha it..

What was the brand, model, and size of the usb drive? I've had intermittent problems with a couple my drives: Kingston Cruizer
and Nexxtech, both 16GB and larger.

its been so long i don't recall. It wasn't a good name brand.

-warmfuzzy

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE, rAmsgAtE, uK. bbs.erb.pw (700:100/37)