Originally Posted by
herulach
firstly, stop faffing with it, you're potentially introducing additional errors. I've had success with USB sticks in similar condition using a standard linux distro together with dd then trying to recover data from that image. There are more advanced tools, but I was fortunate enough to get everything I wanted with dd, mount and then copy (and a long rant at the wife about keeping 6 years of work on a memory stick with no backup even though she only has to copy it to her laptop to have 3 redundant copies).