Re: [gentoo-user] flash drive FAT partition disappears

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Marcus Wanner <marcusw@cox.net> wrote:
> On 11/19/2009 3:22 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>>
>> I suspect you did nothing wrong and that the problem is either a
>> coincidental hardware failure or something the owner did to the stick
>> after you returned it. Convincing the owner of that is another matter.
>>
>
> I am pretty sure that this is the case. The fact that the partition table is
> no longer valid is very interesting, and I would be interested in seeing the
> first 512 bytes (I believe that is where the partition table resides) of the
> dd image, if you can make one, just to see if it's corrupt or has been
> correctly erased. The fact that there is 2 TB left according to gparted
> leads me to believe that it is corrupt, which would mean that it is probably
> a hardware failure, and nothing to do with Linux, as someone else said.
>
> Good luck with that student, here's hoping there was nothing important on
> that drive when it died!
>
> Marcus

On the bright side, if ONLY the partition table was corrupt, maybe
re-creating it with fdisk might make the data accessible again. You
might also try a tool like dfsee which might be able to analyse or
extract some partiton/FAT data from it.