recovering a notepad on a broken memory stick

Question

So I'm not sure where to begin, I have a memory stick, Kingston Data traveler, 2.0, 30 GB, out of which I can use 29 Gb, now I have been using this stick for years, both for work and personal matters, the last time I used it was on the 25.08.2024, I just saved a link on a notepad. Now a small detail I just pull out the stick once I'm done using it, I tried to safely remove it however the option is not always there so I just prefered to rip it out.

The problem started yesterday when I inserted the stick and wanted search something on it, and surprise it told me that I need to format the stick before I can use it.....my heart dropped, I had a similar problem with a back up external hard drive in 2022 there after checking the hard for errors it worked again without data loss, here it told me it couldn't find the stick to run the error checker.

So began my journey to try and recover those documents, I searched online for advice, sadly I'm using a Windows 7 so there is no backup, no app data roaming, I tried disck checker yet that didn't work as there was a problem, I tried changing the name of the stick, it did not work.

At this point I got desperate and started instaling recommneded recover programs, I started with testdisk-7.2.win, either MiniTool Partition Wizard or Disk Genius actually managed to show me a preview the lost data, it was all there, especially the important notepad I could only take screen shots but it was great I figured I could do it I could recover it all no need for incomplete screenshots, so to copy it I cleared out space on an external HDD, sadly it refused to copy it as it was not unalocated space, I had no idea what it meant, I tried clearing space in the laptop and still nothing, at that point I looked through the option and found that it did have an option for error checking and I clicked it, I remembered how it worked last time and figured that it being a dedicated program it should work better, it did, I recovered 99% of the data on the stick HOWEVER that one notepad was empty....all of the other notepads have been recovered and have the data on them however this last one that is the most important one is empty.

I need to get that data back, I have tried EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, Disk Drill, Cisdem Data Recovery, MyRecover, none of them have managed to recover it, they have found stuff from years ago however this last bit they able to find at most 5% of the data and even that was scattered around, I don't remeber which one it was I started yesterday at 14 and kept going until 02:10 at night so I don't remember which one managed to find a few pieces, the programs managed to find stuff from years ago yet this small document, the last piece is something that they are unable to find, again they found other notepads except this one......is there any hope for me recovering it? do I need another program? currently I'm using the free versions of the programs, the subscriptions are rather high, I asked on a forum for EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and for the attempt they would charge me 120 euros....do I have any hope of recovering it? should I try paying it? I'm rather strapped for cash right now but I do want to recover the data.

Answer 1

If you're trying to recover a notepad file that only has (had?) a link URL inside it, then a good method would be to try a hex editor. Using the hex editor, you should be able to open the drive and see all the "raw data" (no files, just hex or ASCII bytes interpretation). The recovery software you tried was able to read the drive, so a hex editor will also.

From that point, hopefully you remember some part of the URL, and then you can perform a search. The search will search over all bytes. It will have to check for a match by moving one byte at a time, so it may take a while. If you don't know part of the URL, you can still give it a try with a search on "https" or something, and try to find all URLs. Depending on the hex editor, you can probably configure the search to give you all results at the end rather than one result at a time.

A notepad file is a plain text file and generally does not have any standard header or footer. That means its contents will show up in raw data of the drive as just bytes or text stuck between other data. You can see this if you are trying out hex editor software and you save a new notepad file with something very specific inside it (to a different location... don't write to the problem drive), and then go look for it with the hex editor. Also, if it's a large enough file, it's possible to have fragmentation - parts (blocks/sectors) of the file may be not contiguous within the raw data.

The recovery program you tried did output a notepad file, so it must have used the file system details to do that (as there is no header/footer to help out). The file system would have identified the location of the file, length, etc. It didn't have what you need, so that was no help. I can't say for sure why it didn't, but given your scenario, it's possible the notepad file was not written before you unplugged the flash drive. Other problems are possible though such as an inconsistent file system or corruption.

There is no guarantee the data will be there. If it did write to the drive before unplugging, and you haven't written new data to the drive, then it should be there somewhere.