Corrupted USB flash drive - best way to recover?

[peterl]

So 'a friend' saves a Word file to a 4G flash drive, then pulls it out without closing Word and without Safely removing.
I insert it into my machine, and it's 'Drive not formatted - format now?'.
So I say no.
Chkdsk /f on it reports:

The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

Properties on the drive reports 0 bytes available.
What is a RAW drive? I know of RAW image files, but not RAW drives.
Is it possible to recover the disk without reformatting it?
Yes, 'my friend' now knows what she did was silly, but blimey it would be better if Win didn't go and corrupt the whole drive.

There's a few products apparently to fix such problems - if anyone's tried one with success I'd be interested.

http://www.ptdd.com/datarecovery/recover-raw-drive.htm
http://www.adrc.com/software/data_recovery_tools/

Thanks for any ideas.

Peter

[Medico]

RAW basically means a disk with no file system associated with it. Check this article for a possible recovery procedure.

[junkcollector]

Thanks for the tip, Ted - it worked. I had an SD card from my camera that was toasted by a bad card reader on a school computer and ZAR was able to recover all 217 jpg and mp4 files!

[Windowssecretsuser67]

It is definitely a typical RAW drive problem. And RAW drive cannot be recognized under Windows or Mac system. Therefore, you cannot access the data inside the RAW drive.
However, fortunately, you also could try a flash drive recovery freeware to save the inner data and format this flash drive to save this physical drive.
Honestly, this freeware has helped me recover the photos, pictures, music and files from my RAW drive. It will also never let you down. Go try it!
Note:
1. Do not store any new data on this hard drive in case of the original data overwritten by new data, which can make it gone forever.
2. Do not save the recovered data on the same drive in case of recovery failure.
3. Do not forget to format it for changing the RAW file system into previous NTFS or FAT32.
4. Do not forget to back up your important regularly in the future.

[biga]

For the future, there is a good pay program being given away today Jan 13, 2013 only at Glarysoft giveaway. Don't know if posting the link is permissible so just do a search with your favorite search engine for the link to the site.
Name of the program is iCare Data Recovery Pro 5.0. It along with any other program of this type works best if you don't click the format now prompt when you get the drive not formatted message. Follow the instructions for the recovery program instead. Be sure to follow the instructions for installing the program to the letter.

[Medico]

Unfortunately this was only good for one day (1/13). The normal price appears to be $89.95.

For those interested in the daily giveaway from Glarysoft it can be found here.

[RetiredGeek]

Looks like iCare Recovery Standard will be free on 4/28 at the Glarysoft site cited by Ted. HTH