Here’s the story: a friend of mine was copying photos off her passport from her vacation to her computer’s hard drive after she got back, and dropped it while she was doing it. The drive stopped working. I recovered some of her photos from her cards, but not all of them and she really would like to get the rest (but not to the tune of Driversavers’ price).
Anyway, I tried some non-lethal methods and I couldn’t get the data recovered. I was hoping hers was one of the older passports with the removable USB board, so I cracked it open and it’s the one with on circut SATA/USB port.
Smartwear reports it’s locked, but neither it nor unlock.exe can unlock it or format it (she says she never set a password). I’ve also tried to update the firmware and it doesn’t work.
It shows up in my devices and disk managment and is recognized as USB storage when I first plug it in, but it doesn’t show up as a drive in my computer. I’m running testdisk deep scan right now, but the quick scan reported a read error, so I’m not hopeful. Disk management reports it’s uninitilized and write protected.
Any other things I can try? I have access to a mac, a pc and ubuntu. This seems a common story here, but most of the threads I read are older. Maybe there’s something new I missed.
