Recently, my USB drive has refused to allow any Windows or Linux system to access my photo directory that I have on the USB drive. Whenever I did ls, the results were just a mess of symbols, and a repeat of Input/Output error. I used dmesg, and received a "FAT: Filesystem panic" error. I proceeded to find out that sometimes running the command "sudo fsck.msdos -a /dev/pathtodevice" would fix the problem (In this case, the damaged files in the /photos directory). However, once the command ran, it went through many files... and finally finished with this:

Is there any way to repair this USB without reformatting it? I don't have this data saved anywhere else, and would really like to salvage it if my USB is on it's way out.

Oh, and my USB is an old SanDisk Cruzer Micro 512 MB.

look up the man page on the command dd, and search in here for it

Hopefully that might help you, but I have to say it doesn't sound like a job i'd want. pendrives have a shelflife, and should only ever be a mobile version of your data on your PC.

Hi, you should be able to recover the file with testdisk photorec.

This is a great tool...
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Hope that helps, Glenn

Worked like a charm. Thank you so much!

Glad to be of help.

Don't forget to back up your data this time!