Script or program to read RAW data

Question

Ok, I had a usb flash drive which had data and was using FAT32 file table, till yesterday!!

I had been using it only in Windows. Now when I plugin the usb flash drive, Windows XP reports the file system as RAW and trying to access the drive asks to format the drive. I desperately need to get some data out from there (the backup is a few days old :( )

I've already used a dozen of programs under windows that claim to read RAW data, but none has worked yet. Is there any script, utility or program under FreeBSD or Windows that will aid me in getting that data back? If I plugin the usb drive to my FreeBSD box it only appears as /dev/da0, so I cannot mount it.

Apologies if I am not making sense, but is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

Many thanks

Answer 1

You can use dd to make a raw copy:

dd if=/device of=target_file

After that, you may want to google for "data carving", and use a program such as foremost.