How do I recover files from an USB flash drive?

"Assuming it's also not showing in the BIOS when plugged into a system, and since it's not being recognized by the OS(s) you tried, the bad news is it sounds dead. The better news is, it may just be the power sub-system, and the data may still be in the flash memory.

I'd have to say your best bet is to send it off to a professional data recovery place that does flash media. Many (most) offer free evalutation and quotation, you just have to pay the shipping. Most also offer that if in the end they can't get it back, you don't pay.

You can then decide if the recovery fee is worth it, without investing much."

"I would really like to recommend GetDataBack from Runtime Software. They have two different versions, one for FAT32 and one for NTFS. Despite costing money, they are invaluable tools, on par with SpinRite from GRC (if you are running hard disk drives) and are worth every penny.

Previously I have been able to restore files from an NTFS volume which was formatted and had Windows reinstalled on top of it, as well as another system which had CentOS (Linux) partitioned, formatted, and installed over, and was still able to find data on the drive."
"I would really like to recommend GetDataBack from Runtime Software. They have two different versions, one for FAT32 and one for NTFS. Despite costing money, they are invaluable tools, on par with SpinRite from GRC (if you are running hard disk drives) and are worth every penny.

Previously I have been able to restore files from an NTFS volume which was formatted and had Windows reinstalled on top of it, as well as another system which had CentOS (Linux) partitioned, formatted, and installed over, and was still able to find data on the drive."

"I had great success recovering some Nikon RAW image files using http://store.lexar.com/imagerescue3/index.cfm.

It is a very simple process, but it took 30 minutes for a 2 GB SD card. I did have to do a quick format of the card first so that the OS could see the card as it really was stuffed. This just deleted the file table and doesn't do anything to the actual data, so it is reasonably safe to do, but only do this if needed."