I already ow the answer but... (memory stick related Q)

[Frontpaw]

I popped in my memory stick into my old laptop and I go t the message that says I need to format this before I can use it. It's an old stick that has loads of things on it.

I assumed it was the old machine playing up and tried in in one of the new laptops. Same thing.

It is completely unretieveable?

Anyone?

It depends. If it's just a few failed memory cells in the wrong place, you could be OK. If it's failed completely then you're out of luck.

I would guess that it's probably retrievable, but that's just a guess. When I have had a "failed" SD card, I was able to recover all the data with Photorec.