"Need to format the USB Flash drive" message... can the data be recovered

I have a USB flash drive, that when plugged into any machine (XP, Vista or Windows 7) the following message is displayed:

Indeed looking at the drive in Disk Managment the file system is recognized as RAW. This USB key was previously working on several different XP machines and has not been used on a Mac.

I suspect at some point in time the Flash Drive has suffered a shock, which has damaged the flash chip. Has anyone had any experience or sucess recovering data from these drives at minimal cost. Failing that has anyone got some good tips to give to users on care of USB flash drives?

Solution 1:

I'd recommend running test disk over it to see if you can recover the partition table I linked to some instructions for it in this question Partition table corrupted (USB flash drive)

Solution 2:

PhotoRec is great for recovering deleted images and other files. It's also GPL.

Solution 3:

I've had good luck using R-Studio to recover deleted files on hard drives, I'm not sure if it will work on flash drives. It's worth a shot -- you can download a free demo on their website.