As a WAG, perhaps the demand just isn’t there because current drives really are very reliable. In my last, oh, at least ten years of heavy computer use both at home and at work, Windows, Macs and Linux, laptops and desktops, I have never had a drive actually fail. I’ve needed to recover files that I deleted in error, but that’s completely different.
Just to make sure - Have you checked your disk manager to see if its there, and just not being recognized? In Windows XP, you right-click on your “My Computer” icon, choose the Manage option, and then go to Disk Management.
If you see it there, but there’s no drive letter listed, that means its not being shown. Try changing the drive letter to X or Z, and see what happens.
I hope this incident teaches everyone to backup.
Do they work in the same manner as CF cards? I’ve had several CF cards go south on me, but I’ve always been able to recover all (or 95%+ of) the data on them. It seems to me that it’s usually the directory structure or whatnot that gets fried, but not the data itself. Am I misunderstanding how these things work?
And sound your horn before engaging reverse.
I have run into several fried flash drives – totally unrecoverable unless you want to go the route of trying to mess with the electronics. You can Google lots of data on this. Thing is, I think anyone who stores all their data on a flash drive is basically nuts. It reminds me of the people who used to do the same thing with floppy disk, and then cry when it would go bad and they would lose their files. I have an absolute certainty that any portable media will sooner or later go bad. So my stable routine is that all originals live on a hard disk which gets backed up nightly. The flash drive is for TEMPORARY storage only, like taking some files to another computer to work on and then bring them back to my main computer. I never trust portable media.