I have here an (originally) NTFS formatted USB memory stick which has been corrupted (boot record damaged, perhaps). At any rate, Windows CHKDSK reports that its format is now RAW.
To see if recovery of the data on it was feasible I downloaded and ran the trial version of DiskInternals' 'NTFS Recovery' utility (again, Windows) and it seems to think there is a good prospect of recovering a few JPEG images and word documents from the stick.
Of course, to do that, it wants me to buy a key for 99usd, in order to make the programme fully functional.
Now, certainly, if the recovery of this information was a matter of life and death then 100usd would be a fair price to pay, but the information on this stick does not (I am told) fall into that critical category - it's more a case of it having sentimental value.
So I thought I might as well ask: Is there a comparable, trustworthy disc recovery tool out there in Linux-Land? A simple 'un-deleter' is not enough - it needs to be something which can trawl through the stick at sector level looking for bits of file, threading them back together and generating new names for them.
I've done a search through the forums but didn't find anything on this - apologies if I missed it. You could say that I could have just Googled this but for every genuine tool or utility out there in the wild there seem to be a dozen items of Malware posing as similar utilities - so I'd prefer word of mouth advice based on experience.