How to restore unreadable USB flash drive under Mac OS X

Today I found that I can’t access to my 8Gb USB flash drive. I can find it in Finder, but the System gets stuck while accessing to it. What to do? If you want to recover data from a USB flash it’s better to stop reading this post now and continue googling “USB flash data recovery” or something. Here’s a step-by-step instruction how to make your USB flash drive work again under Mac OS X.

1. Open Terminal and go to /dev

$ cd /dev

2. Now it’s time to find your flash drive in /dev. Typically it’s /dev/diskN where N could be 0, 1, 2, 3, etc

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            120.5 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *8.1 GB     disk3
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data KB                      7.9 GB     disk3s2

OK! It’s disk number 3, i.e. /dev/disk3 Remember the name of partition (it’s KB in my case). Your flash drive is mounted as /Volumes/NAME Continue reading »