My brother lost his coursework on his pen drive... Help?

Question

When my brother was working on his coursework last night and tried to save it onto his jump-drive, he recieved a message that said something along the lines of "cannot save - file is corrupt". He had already saved it a few times earlier but cannot find the piece he had written (about six pages long).

The Jump Drive is a Lexar 128mb . All the other files on it remain fine (touch wood). Unfortunately I cannot tell you the exact message that popped up, as I wasn't there at the time.
Please help me out a bit, as the assignment is due in nearly a week.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can try one of the file recovery applications that people use to recover deleted files. Depending on how active the writing is to the pen drive, the previous versions may still exist on there.

Another option would be to look through the desktop user's home directory for temporary files that may contain the document too. Maybe one of those files contains the latest version. Check in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data.

** Edit **
As the poster above me indicated, saving to local disk and then to the external drive can sometimes save you a lot of headaches. Given that it is data generated by your brother, having multiple copies in multiple locations is also a good idea. The last thing you want is to have a disk crash, lose the pen drive, a scratched CD/DVD, etc... and have that as the only copy.

Answer 2

http://www.recuva.com/

try that anyway for a start

but it's better to save to hard drive, then the pen drive

sounds like the pen drive has problems.
running chkdsk after might help, don't run it till you have recovered the file or attempted to.

Answer 3

You may try this solution
http://www.asoftech.com/articles/usb-drive-data-recovery.html

helped me many times.