Effective trick to recover lost/corrupted files

Today I almost lost 4 gigabytes of my life. I thought my Sony D33021 USB flash disk ditched me for good when all the most important files for the wedding (which is basically all that's in it) got corrupted. My fault though because the queen of negligence in me got so carried away by this amazing little speakers which sound produced is just oh so loud you'd almost think it comes from a ginormous amplifier. During the outing last weekend, I so easily shared my playlist to the gang by inserting the flash disk to it. The next day, voila! Files are gone.

the culprit (photo from Google)

So these are the steps I tried in the attempt to revive the particular portion of my existence stored in the device.

I went to Google (like in any situation), and typed in "recover corrupted files". I landed to so many pages offering different softwares but this one was what I downloaded -- EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard.

I got so excited for the software to finish searching for all the lost files only to find out in the end that it needs a certain serial number to be able to retrieve the files found. USELESS. Because I didn't have any serial number. To be honest, I was clueless what that is and where to find it. I gave myself some good 1 hr to search for more but to no avail.

Then I made the best decision. I gave up. Gracefully. Haha. I realized it was a good move to quit especially when I know that regardless of how resourceful I am when it comes to researching solutions to any day to day problems, I was not given any technical giftings. Dude, until now I get so confused whenever I try to download a movie. You can imagine how hard it is for me to even try and find certain software for corrupted file retrieval.

Anyway, to cut the boring story short, I shouted out my predicament on Facebook. You know, the usual rants when something terrible happens to you. And lo and behold, in less than 5 minutes, I got a PM from a friend whom I met thru Monster Hug Pillow.

Gwen Janelle Lontok, a buyer of the pillow, instructed me to do key in the following on the computer's cmd screen:

attrib -h -r -s /s /d drive:\*.*

Again, that's attrib(space)-h(space)-r(space)-s(space)/s(space)/d(space)[corrupted drive]:\*.*

In my case, since the USB was in drive J, the formula I encoded looks like this:

attrib -h -r -s /s /d j:\*.*

Apparently, Gwen who is no IT/CS person has been using this formula to save corrupted files back in college. Why didn't I know this in college?! Unfair! I should say whoever invented this formula is a genius because in a split of second upon entering the code, my files were back! Imagine I spent almost a couple of hours searching and downloading those pricey software and here's this little magic trick that brought back all my treasure in no time!