What can I do to rescue my car songs from RAW format USB flash drive?

[ClaraCereo00]

Hope I can find useful clues here! This morning, when opening a Transcend USB flash drive with many songs that often are heard inside my car on my PC, it is shows: "The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" Open its properties interface and check it there. Its used space and free space are both 0 bytes. Its file system type is also in RAW. What does that indicate? My flash drive is damaged or corrupted somehow? Since I still need the inner stored documents and photos, I do have checked the related topic online and found many forum threads recommended people to use RAW file system flash drive recovery software, like

http://www.icare-recovery.com/howto/flash-drive-raw-format-asking-to-reformat.html

And http://www.piriform.com/recuva

How do you think? I really have no idea about such software and data recovery information. Thank you for any suggestion here!

 

[akirby]

Could be damaged. Does it still work in the car for songs? Have you tried it on a different PC? If it still doesn't work some type of recovery software is your only hope.

[knickerbocker]

It sounds like the USB drive's MFT (master file table) is corrupt. This can happen by removing the device while it is being accessed.

 

The problem is easily fixed by formatting the drive as the message suggests. That does, however, permanently delete all data that may still exist on the drive.

 

Windows has a tool called Check Disk (chkdsk) that can repair the MFT on a corrupted USB. I did a quick google search and found this set of instructions on using chkdsk to repair a USB drive:

http://html5.litten.com/updated-how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/

 

Good luck! Hope this helps.