USB flash drive showing empty but half of the capacity is in Used

usb-flash-drive

Not sure if I should post my question in superuser, but it looks like the most appropriate place among all StackExchange sites.

I have a 16GB Kingston DataTraveler USB drive. When I tried to use it this morning, it showed up nothing in there but yet its details showed that half of the capacity was in used. I tried it with OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows 7 and the results were the same. I tried to create a new folder and it worked. Apparently, the drive is working but somehow not showing my previously stored data. Note that I was still using the drive last night and there wasn't any problems.

Following @rob's suggestion,
du -h gave me: 

16K 
./.Trashes 960K 
./.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/2620683B-A38B-42F4-A247-45CAF4826ADE 976K ./.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores 1008K 
./.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1 1.0M 
./.Spotlight-V100 1.1M

And, df -h gave me: 

/dev/sdb1 15G 7.9G 7.1G 53% /media/KINGSTON

Confirming what I reported.

Anyone got a clue/answer to this issue? Thanks.

Best Answer

Did the files/folders get marked as hidden, or are they simply unreadable to the user accounts you're using?

On Linux, open the terminal and login as root or run sudo bash. Then cd to the USB drive (usually a subdirectory in /media/), and run the command ls -a. From that directory, also try du -h to see the sizes of the files/directories on the drive. You can also compare this to the output of df -h, which reports filesystem usage.

If you still can't see the files as root (i.e., if the number returned by du -hs isn't about the same as that from df -h), the filesystem on your USB drive is probably corrupted somehow. You can try a file recovery tool like PhotoRec or Recuva (both free programs).

In the past, I've also used RecoverMyFiles ($70) with good results. Most commercial data recovery software will let you scan a drive for free to see if any data is recoverable, then you buy a license key to activate the recovery feature.

Just be sure to restore the files onto a different drive or filesystem (like a folder on your desktop), otherwise you risk overwriting some of the data that you're trying to recover.

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