I broke my jump drive...

May 19, 2005 1:34 AM

I have a 512 MB Lexar jump drive, which I connected to my brother's computer before installing windows. I didn't think about this while instructing him on the install, and the partition on the jump drive was deleted. How can I fix it?
posted by borkencode to Technology (3 answers total)

I would think you could use windows partion utility (if its win) or there are a lot of free-ware partition utilities. Make sure he backs up whatever's already in the drove before he partitions.
posted by efalk at 3:20 AM on May 19, 2005

Probably depends on how the partition was zapped - if it was just fdisk'd, but not formatted and installed, you should be able to use the command "fdisk /mbr" to re-write the master boot record.

Other than that, I'm not too sure...
posted by Chunder at 5:10 AM on May 19, 2005

No, you don't want to repartition the drive. That's presumably what already happened to it that caused everything to disappear. And repairing the MBR is only for disks that are readable but won't boot.

What you want is a data recovery utility that find the files even with the wiped out partition table. I've used R-Studio successfully with a very similar situation (flash card wiped out by the XP installer). It's not free, though I'm sure you can find a copy somewhere on the Internet. The demo will at least tell you if your files are still there.
posted by yarmond at 12:49 PM on May 19, 2005