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[Q] Oh noes, my USB flash drive died! How to recover?

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Misalf:
I'm upset because I fear to loose all my settings, scripts, modifications I did to TinyCore and GRUB2.

I always boot TC from my USB flash drive (much quicker than my HDD) and didn't have made backups to an alternate storage device (bummer).
Yesterday USB boot failed 2 or 3 times - but was working again without a glitch after powering off my PC. It boots natively from USB via BIOS.

Now, the OSes I have installed on HDD do not recognize any filesystem on it.

GParted shows the hole drive as 'unallocated' space - and is unable to repair the partition table (Attempt Data Rescue...).

fdisk also can't see a valid partition table and shows only 'unallocated' space (option v).


Please, does anyone have an idea hot to recover the data? I really do not want to format.


I am (was) using an USB flash drive (Kingston DataTraveler G3 - 4GB) to boot several Linuxes via GRUB2 (v2.00).
Partitions:
3BG FAT32
  (data + .ISOs)
~700MB EXT2
  (BOOT + GRUB2 + TinyCore)

I recently added making use of the env_var feature to grub.cfg (for booting lastly selected OS).
At the very last succsessful boot, I saw a message after loading TinyCore's initrd (my grub.cfg echo'es that) about an bad env_var entry or something similar (I also played with unicode characters in menu titles).
Though, everything booted and worked fine - until reboot (without saving the session).


Thanks in advance.

gerald_clark:
You can try re-creating the fdisk partitions to be exactly like they were before.
Then try accessing the filesytsems.
The problem with flash drives is that when they die, they are generally completely unrecoverable.

Misalf:
So I have to know/guess the correct partitioning.. Is there any tool that can lead me a hand there?
The problem is I moved and merged partitions when I ran out of space.

The result was that xfe in TinyCore always showed me this:
/mnt/sdb (not mountable/usable)
/mnt/sdb1 (ext2)
/mnt/sdb3 (fat32)

So I have no idea where the first partition (the important one for me) would start.

gerald_clark:
You might try the testdisk app.

andyj:
Try to dd the whole drive to a file on a regular hard drive, then attach it to a loop device. Then try data recovery from there. But then a boot drive shouldn't have much data in the first place. That's why you're keeping the drives separate, right?

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