I have several documents that I've worked VERY hard on held hostage now on a USB drive - all of the sudden when I put the drive in any computer and try to open it says "please insert disc into removeable disc"
I have changed the drive letter (to W:) as suggested on a google search as well as ran the recovery program "Recuva" that gives me the error "unable to open drive"
I'm pretty desperate to get these docs back, as I no longer have the computer they originated from. Does anyone have any ideas? Or am I screwed?
I am not sure if you have faithfully reported the exact error message because the one you have given doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
You mention that the USB device does not work normally on any computer. I think we can deduce that there may be some form of hardware problem with this device. If so, you are going to need something other than a software solution such as this "Recuva" program. These data recovery tools are usually targeted at a case where the file system has been damaged, but where there is nothing wrong with the block device. That doesn't sound like your situation, based on the limited information in your post.
You haven't described what this USB device actually is. If it's a "USB hard drive", then the device is basically just an encasement and USB adapter wrapped around a normal SATA hard drive. If you're lucky, the problem might be with the USB adapter and you could remove the encasement and connect the drive via SATA instead. I would definitely try that first since it's easy to do yourself, but this only applies if the device is actually a USB hard drive, as distinguished from other USB storage devices.
Regardless of what kind of USB device it is, it's possible that the data is still on the device, even if something is malfunctioning that prevents using the device normally. There are many forensics techniques that can be used to read data from devices in this kind of situation. These techniques require advanced tools that you probably don't own. If the data is really important to you, you can pay for a forensics data recovery service. There are many companies that provide this service. It is commonly used by law enforcement and for other purposes.
...Also, make sure that the USB is not being read when you pull it out of a computer. Windows has an "eject" feature which you can use, but that's not necessary as long as you wait until it's not being read. However, if you have a tendency to pull them out too fast, then train yourself to use that feature.
This is an example of something that would merely potentially damage the file system, not the underlying block device. In that kind of situation, it's very likely that you can recover some or all the data using a software tool that reads the data from the block device bypassing the file system.
Unfortunately, based on what OP said, the OP's situation sounds more like a hardware problem than a file system problem.
