I have a 1G drive I carry on my key chain. I don't use it a whole lot, but it's handy for transporting files between home and office.
I have been working on a spreadsheet (xls) and this afternoon when I opened it up, nada.
Excel opens, but all i get is the main window (like when you close the sheet but not excel itself) I've run the defrag and scanned for errors and that's about the limit of my knowledge.
I did read about freezing the drive and may try that later.
I can't remember if I have a copy of this on the server at the office or not. I hope i do.
I mean, I have older copies of it so Im not totally SOL, but still.
Anybody have any data recovery tricks?
All the other files and pictures I have on the drive open just fine, every one of them.
Because USB drives are solid state (no moving parts) they can act up after so many read/writes. I've had that happen on occasion to drives that are used a lot. I don't know about freezing the drive as I've never heard of that - and I can't see how that would do anything.
Have you tried opening the file on a different computer?
I tried on my wife's laptop (runs linux) with no luck.
It's about 2 years old, but it probably hasn't read/written more than once a month on average.
hummm.......
Then there's no reason (work use related) for what could have caused that to happen. When you plug it in, is there anyway to tell if it's powering up?
If so, a colleague of mine highly recommended Roadkil Unstoppable Copier which:
"Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file were not recoverable in the end."
Which you can download here: http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29 (http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29)
Oh it powers up no problem.
As I mentioned, every other file I have on it will open.
Just not the one I wanted to work on today [bang]
Quote from: Monsterlover on October 20, 2010, 01:14:05 PM
Oh it powers up no problem.
As I mentioned, every other file I have on it will open.
Just not the one I wanted to work on today [bang]
Try that piece of software and if all else fails, at least you have a backup saved elsewhere.
Are you able to open any other Excel file at home? What version of Excel were you using when you created it? You might could try opening it in Google Docs or Open office or the like to see if there is a version incompatibility.
An incompatibility wouldn't make sense if he's been able to open it in the past.
Probably not, but you can save excel files in different compatibility modes. Might be worth a shot.
I don't have any suggestions on recovering the data, but I have noticed that some Lexar brand flash drives don't like being battered on a key chain. I know it doesn't quite make sense considering that it's solid state but it's something I've noticed.
huh. I got this one at a trade show a couple years ago, no brand name on it, just company logos
I'll try google docs and see. . .
Excel 2000 on both home and office computer
As mentioned above, I can open any other excel file off the usb drive, just not this one :(
Quote from: Monsterlover on October 20, 2010, 01:56:22 PM
huh. I got this one at a trade show a couple years ago, no brand name on it, just company logos
Eck... My mom got a no-name flash drive from Olympus when their salesman came to sell them a microscope. The darn thing died after 6mo of light use and something close to 1yr of non-use. Those no-name things can be really iffy. I'd back up all your other stuff now to make sure that you don't lose anything else. :-\
I did!
[thumbsup]
Quote from: Monsterlover on October 20, 2010, 01:14:05 PM
Oh it powers up no problem.
As I mentioned, every other file I have on it will open.
Just not the one I wanted to work on today [bang]
I think you screwed it up. :-*
Operator error?
Inconceivable!
Quote from: Monsterlover on October 20, 2010, 05:48:48 PM
Operator error?
Inconceivable!
'Cuz you're so...
awesome...
right? [evil]
try to copy the file from the usb drive to the local drive on your computer. is the filesize the same on both sides?
if the file is corrupted, but relatively intact, you can try a repair:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/repairing-corrupted-files-in-excel-HA001034656.aspx (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/repairing-corrupted-files-in-excel-HA001034656.aspx)
Doh!
I dumped the old file and started over from an older version before I read your post. . .