Cruzer reads as Orbit suddenly and lost all data!

Dear experts,

I have a Sandisk Cruzer Orbit 16 GB and it had my disk encryption keys for my 2 laptops.

Since yesterday it has been showing that it is Sandisk Firebird and now it shows a partition of 64 MB.
Nobody had access to it. I vaguely remmber WIndows prompting me to install drivers for Firebird
I checked this drive on a unix OS and the system does indeed read Sandisk Firebird.

I am totally helples now. I cannot read my files since the encryption keys were on that USB drive

dd shows all 00000.
Is there any way I can read just one file… the encryption key file.

Yes I was stupid not to have a backup but it’s a new pendrive and I trusted Sandisk for atleast a few weeks.

Please suggest a solution !!

dd shows all 00000.

That’s not good.  But the drive you said is 16 GB and you’re only seeing 64 MB, so maybe your file(s) are still there.  Something happened; power surge, quick removal, nearby magnetic field, whatever, caused the partition table to change.  If the files on the drive are really important I would look for a data recovery company to try to recover you files.  Preferrably a local one where you can walk in with it and talk to the techs.  It may cost you $100 but if it’s that important it may be worth it.

Good luck my friend.

You can also just search online for open source file recovery software. It may not be 100% guarrantee but it’s worth the try here. Sorry that you have to experience this the hard way. 

Thanks Ed_P and kitscht

I researched a little and I realised that if I change the PID to 557C (which is now something else of Firebird6sp9) then there is some hope. I shooted some CHinese and Russian tools for that but none of them seem to be able to do that.

I am sure all users of Sandisk would want such a tool. I know a few other manufacturers who provide Firmware flashing utilities.

I have another exactly same pen drive and that works. I understand that the data is stil there and there are a few services online / offline which can dissolder the chip and replace to make it work but that is too risky.

Anyways I ended up making a list of passwords for the encryption key of the disk which is locked. It seems it will take around a few years to brute force them :stuck_out_tongue:

Also there is no tool readily available to do that.

Maybe I will wait for some backdoor / side channel attack to come up in years ahead or a superfast cluster computer to help accelerate the BF.

Thanks.

Forgot to mention: I have taken disk images of my encrypted drives for future just in case the USB drive magically startes to work.

Fingers crossed, even the toes and testicles… well not actually :wink: