Know How to Perform USB Flash Drive & Pen Drive Forensics Easily

The technical support team is steadfast in resolving issues and this time as well, the query probed by the client asserting, “Kindly help to carry out the recovery of deleted and corrupted data files from Pen Drive for investigation purposes,” was resolved with a unique formula for carving out the files from damaged Pen Drives. The solution claims to be a seamless solution for digital forensics, law enforcement, personal usage, and organizational consumption. The basic strategies for investigation have to be done manually and when needed, the tool is suggested for further investigation.

Nowadays, portable digital device usage has seen exponential growth, which is growing parallel to consumer electronics. Flash memory technology, especially USB drives or pen drives, has ruled out non-volatile technology for easy accessibility and storage. These storage devices are also upright resources from an investigation point of view. But conducting pen drive forensics can be difficult in certain cases where manual procedures are not enough.  

Electronic gadget USB device forensics and forensic flash drive forensics play an important role in the examination of embedded systems, which mainly includes the extraction of data on a logical level. The forensic investigation basically starts with the data acquisition methods of flash memory devices using different approaches.

Exploring USB File System: USB Flash Drive Forensics 

While investigating, mostly the latest USB flash drives are incurred, i.e., FAT 32. Some old flash drives can also be acquired, like FAT 12/16, which means that these devices use the file allocation tables for organizing file names. Usually, there are two copies of the FAT table in case one corrupts. When a file enters this file allocation table, its starting cluster is associated with it. All the clusters belonging to different files are chained together.

What happens during the deletion of any file from a USB drive or pen drive is that the first character of the filename is replaced by an E5 hex character, also known as a stigma. The cluster, however, which was associated with the erased file, is available on the operating system and can be used.

A pen drive, being a flash drive, is a type of EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory) and is non-volatile. This means that it memorizes the value devoid of inducing power and hence is dense. Highly used for storage, the behaviour of these flash-memory pen drives is not like normal memories like RAM or disks. Depending on the type of flash drive—NOR flash or NAND flash—the access and writing of data are managed.

Things to Know Before Conducting a Forensics Investigation

Prior to starting any forensic USB investigation, one must be aware of the algorithm being used for the file storage on that acquired device. Some of the USB flash drives just need to be plugins and can then be used on new systems. But few editions of Windows systems, like Windows 98 and older versions, urge a driver for utilization.

Certain scenarios can be faced by investigators where newer versions, like Windows 95, Millennium, Windows 7, XP, and 98, are unable to recognize the Pen Drive by examination machine. In such a scenario, it is advised to try the flash drive on another system. But it is extremely important to have a USB hardware write-blocker installed in another system in order to prevent any unwanted data transport between the system and Pen Drive. This is to make sure that no alteration or modification is done to the drive and that no malware or virus is transported to it.

Pen Drive Forensics Solution to Recover Lost Data from Pen Drive

In order to recover complete data, including deleted data, from the Pen Drives, the most creditable software application is Pen Drive Data Recovery. This application is a professional utility and is designed to perform a thorough recovery on a damaged or corrupted Pen Drive device.

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It fix corrupted flash drive without formatting. Providing assured recovery of data for a forensics investigation, the software is affiliated with multiple features as well. Pen Drive Recovery Tool needs to be downloaded as a demo version on the system, which can then be converted to a licensed version.

Steps to Recover Lost Data from Pen Drive

Once the user successfully installs the software, follow the below-mentioned steps.

Step 1: Attach the pen drive to the system to recover erased data from pen drive.

Step 2: The tool provides two options: a data recovery scan and a formatted scan. Scan for deleted and corrupted data and formatted scan for formatted data from pen drive

Step 3: After that, the tool preview recovered data from pen drive affected by virus.

Step 4: Save Restored files from pen drive at any Location

The available recovery options provide different types of recovery, like normal recovery of available data files from the pen drive. Deleted Item Recovery provides the recovery of items that were deleted from the Pen Drive, helping investigators view what is unseen. The formatted partition option is to recover data that was formatted intentionally by the culprit.

Conclusion

Digital forensics proceeds with every type of electronic medium that comes across while investigating. Small-scale digital storage mediums like flash drives, including pen drives, are no exception. Eventually, the technology has risen and commenced the area of USB device forensics as well as beneficial recovery tools like Pen Drive recovery software to provide necessary help to law enforcement via pen drive forensics. It can recover deleted photos from pen drive. This tool is the foremost exemplary application to dig out the underlying evidence in the form of data files.

Frequently Asked Questions