USB thumb failed and won't mount

[adn rcd dly]

Hello all,

I hope this is an acceptable place to ask this. I am quite frustrated, mostly at myself due to this failure. Let me tell you what happened and what I've tried.

I had a FCP X project on a 128GB thumb drive (3.0 by PNY) that I was creating favorites in clips from. No extensive editing, but it started to lag. I would let it do it's thing and keep going when I could. It pops up with an error saying there's no space (I'm guessing each favorite I make is making another save or something) and it hangs. Then it says it's been ejected. I figure, okay, I'll just close the project and wait to transfer to a different drive.

I plug the USB in to get the data off and it won't mount. I try mounting in Terminal and it says there is a physical error and I need to mount in readOnly. I attempt that and it will time out. When I put the drive in at first it will be recognized in diskUtil (Terminal command and .app), but nothing can be done to it.

How badly am I screwed in this situation? Is the data completely lost (at least in the sense that the only option is some expensive data recovery company)?

Be gentle. I feel like an idiot and that this is all on me.

Thanks in advance.

 

[sevoneone]

Since the system sees and recognizes the drive and just will not mount it, you should be able to try running something like Prosoft Data Rescue on it. That basically will try to read any raw data from the drive and assemble files from it. I don't know how effective it will be on flash based media, I have only used in on Magnetic storage, but the concepts are the same.

You've learned a lesson the hard way that the flash memory chips in sub flash drives are not as robust as and HDD or the chip. Also, never have your media in only one place. You should have a minimum of three copies on separate drives.