usb stick went into raw

Might be off base but perhaps try a live linux distro... Ubuntu perhaps.

I had decent luck with a thumbdrive that had slipped into RAW with this Easeus product. There was nothing critical on that thumbdrive I didn't have elsewhere, but I gave it a whirl out of curiosity just to see how well it would do in the scan and retrieve and I compared the files (via CRC) to the copies I had elsewhere and it did pretty well. I think a lot of the RAW recovery programs out there are similar.

Also - TestDisk is non-graphical but well-regarded for tricky data corruption situations. Might not be the most comfortable for non-power users. One set of tips for RAW with it are here.

And one tip, if you're going with a trial of the Easeus or any product, don't blow past the installation options without reading as you potentially want to uncheck any toolbars, offers, 3rd-party that supports the trial, etc. If you have a VM kicking around with something like VirtualBox or even Sandboxie you could try doing your install into a new one of the data recovery program and then blow it away after.

+1 for test disk (and by extension photorec for image recovery). I used it to recover all of a coworker's vacation photos off her SD card that suddenly showed as not formatted.

If you don't have any critical data on it, you can just try going into a command prompt and running chkdsk X: /r and it should fix the file system.

M1K3Z0R wrote: ↑If you don't have any critical data on it, you can just try going into a command prompt and running chkdsk X: /r and it should fix the file system.

Yes, I'll just point out (for anyone reading) that the best way to run recovery operations is generally to "read only" from the damaged volume/partition/drive and write to another device or volume. That way you're not disrupting any data on the damaged drive even as you change techniques or programs, and chkdsk definitely would be doing writes. You had the prefixing caveat "If you don't have any critical data on it" so I agree in the context that if it's, say, just a rough backup of files you have elsewhere or "scratch" drive, you can do that just to experiment. In fact, if the USB drive's file system is hosed and it contained nothing of value that you didn't have elsewhere, a reformat of it can be done too.

CasualCauli wrote: ↑ Yes, I'll just point out (for anyone reading) that the best way to run recovery operations is generally to "read only" from the damaged volume/partition/drive and write to another device or volume. That way you're not disrupting any data on the damaged drive even as you change techniques or programs, and chkdsk definitely would be doing writes. You had the prefixing caveat "If you don't have any critical data on it" so I agree in the context that if it's, say, just a rough backup of files you have elsewhere or "scratch" drive, you can do that just to experiment. In fact, if the USB drive's file system is hosed and it contained nothing of value that you didn't have elsewhere, a reformat of it can be done too.

Agreed, always go read only for important jobs. Sounds like OP doesn't know what's on it, hopefully that means it was not important anyway.

Chkdsk can end up trashing some data, it will try to correct what it can but in some cases (like bad sectors) there is only so much it can do. It will create a folder in the root directory that looks like /FOUND.000 and anything recovered tends to end up inside there, possibly intact or it may be corrupt.

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software) is the best program that i have use for these kinds of thing.