I HAVE to get a document from a specific location on a USB flash drive that may be corrupted. I've been given some hope from Google searches which turn up blogs that describe copying files from hopeless external media with Linux. But they're either too specific to the hardware in the example for me to follow or too complicated for me to understand.

Could someone PLEASE offer whatever help? At the least, someone could probably walk me through some command line prompts to verify that the device is COMPLETELY unreachable. The only copy of a 15-page paper is still on this little piece of junk.

My distro is Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic.

Plug in the drive. Run lsusb and see if you can identify the drive by device ID (example: /dev/sda1). Once doing that you can try to mount the drive using the device ID and see if you can access it that way.

Hey, thanks for getting back so quickly.

This is the one in question after running 'lsusb' twice - once with, another without the flash drive connected:

How could I attempt to mount, given this info?

well, mkdir /something, then mount /dev/whatever /something . it will probably require the -t parameter for the type of filesystem that the pendrive is, eg. mount -t vfat /dev/whatever /something

Yea you still need to figure out what device it is in /dev/ but at least you know your machine sees the drive and knows what it is. That is a good sign. Chances are you will be able to recover whats on it.