The word "recovery" is doing a lot of unfair work in this niche. ADATA's own utility is called the Online Recovery Tool, yet what it does is described plainly in the company's launch announcement, covered by HEXUS in November 2011: it restores drive function by rebuilding the firmware and formatting the drive. Rebuilding firmware and formatting are repair operations. They give you a working stick, not your wedding photos.

Recovery software works from opposite end. It ignores whether the drive is healthy and reads the raw sectors, looking for file signatures and directory records that a delete or a quick format left behind. Nothing is written back to the ADATA drive. The files land on a different disk, which is why recovery can run on a stick that Windows refuses to open.

Both halves have the same limit. Neither repair nor recovery does anything for a drive whose controller has failed. That case is further down the page.

You start it from ADATA's official support page, where the drive's model and serial number are checked before a small executable is offered for download. From there the process runs locally against the connected stick. The "online" part is that lookup: ADATA's site decides whether your model is on the supported list, and forum users have spent years wrestling with the form when it is not.

The same announcement names the three failure states the utility targets. Two of them cover a drive Windows cannot write to or cannot format. The third is a drive Windows detects but cannot read. Notice what is absent from that list. Nothing there is about getting deleted files back, because that is not what the ADATA usb repair tool is for.

There is one case where the vendor utility deserves to go first. If the stick was empty anyway, or everything on it is already backed up, it is a good place to start, and it costs you nothing.

This prompt looks alarming because the drive reports 0 bytes of capacity and 0 bytes free at the same time. On the r/datarecovery threads about this error the pattern repeats. The drive was used normally, ejected normally, and came back RAW.
What happened is usually mundane. A write was interrupted, the file system metadata got half-written, and Windows now refuses to mount a structure it does not trust. Your JPEGs are still lying in the same sectors they always were. Windows just lost the index to them.

Do not click Format disk on that dialog. Run a recovery scan and get the files out first. Once they are safe, format the drive, and if it still misbehaves after a clean format, move on to the vendor ADATA flash drive repair tool or to the controller section below.

Start with the honest version of the fix. Open Command Prompt as administrator and run diskpart:
diskpartlist diskselect disk 2
attributes disk clear readonly
Replace 2 with the number of your ADATA stick, and get that number right. Selecting wrong disk here is how people wipe the wrong drive. If the attribute clears and the drive starts accepting writes, you had a genuine read-only flag and you are done.
If diskpart reports success and the drive is still read-only, that is a different problem. The pattern people describe on data recovery forums is hard to miss. Files copied onto the drive vanish after a reinsert. Deleted files come back on their own. A Windows format reports success and changes nothing on the media. That last one, a format that "works" but does not stick, is the signature of a controller that has switched itself into a protective read-only mode. Copy what you can still read off the stick, and retire it.

Run the cheap checks first. Move the stick to a different USB port, ideally a rear port wired straight to the motherboard. Try a second computer. Look in Disk Management: a drive that appears there without letter is alive, and assigning a letter may bring it straight back.

Device Manager tells you more than File Explorer does. If the drive appears with a warning triangle and "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. Code 43", the controller announced a fault to Windows and Windows dropped it. That exact message on an ADATA stick shows up in Microsoft's Q&A, and the official guidance is generic driver troubleshoting with nothing ADATA-specific behind it. Uninstalling the device and rescanning is worth trying once. Do it a second time and you get the same answer.

Older models are special case worth knowing about. Some ADATA UV128 sticks stopped being recognized in Windows 10 while still working under Windows 7 which points at driver enumeration rather than dead flash. If a drive is invisible on Windows but mounts on a Linux live USB, you have a route to your data.

When you delete from a USB stick, Windows marks the space it used as free. "Free" here means available for the next write. It does not mean wiped. So the most useful thing you can do after a bad delete is also the most boring one: pull the stick out and leave it alone until you have scanner ready on the PC.
Photos are among the friendlier things to recover. JPEG and PNG carry recognizable headers, and so do most camera formats, so a scanner can find them even when the directory entry is long gone. That header is what SoftOrbits Flash Drive Recovery hunts for once the directory is beyond reading.

A quick format leaves those data blocks alone and only resets the file system structures, which is what keeps the headers findable. A full format is a different operation, and honest software will not promise you the same result there. The same logic applies to microSD card recovery software, since the media behaves the same way.

People search for names like "ADATA UFD Recovery Tool P0909" and go to look for a seperate firmware downloader. In practice there is one official channel, the Online Recovery Tool on ADATA's support site. Everything else you find on file-hosting sites with a chip-vendor name attached is unsigned software from unknown source, aimed at a specific controller, and quite capable of bricking a drive that still works.
What almost nobody documents is where the rejection comes from. It is not a compatibility check failing. A long-running AnandTech forum thread on the ADATA repair program reports that the serial engraved on the drive body is simply longer than the web form accepts, so the form truncates it and then fails to match anything. ADATA's own support page says nothing about this. If the trimmed number still gets refused, the model really is outside the supported list, and retyping it will not change that.

Other vendors run the same kind of scheme, with the same confusion between repairing hardware and rescuing files. If your stick is a different brand, the pattern still holds: repair a SanDisk USB flash drive or a Kingston USB recovery tool follows the same order, files first, firmware second.

The tells for a hardware fault are consistent, and you can check them in an afternoon. The drive shows up for a few seconds, then drops off by itself. The same error follows it to every PC you try, not just yours. "F:\ The directory name is invalid" keeps coming back after every fix. Data recovery professionals answering these threads say the same thing: the controller is failing, there is no DIY fix, take it to a specialist. The threads behind that verdict are linked in the pitfalls below.
The reason is mechanical. Every program that reads a USB stick, ours included, talks to the flash chips through the drive's controller. There is no way around it, because the controller is what turns "read this file" into the raw commands that the NAND chips actually understand, and when it stops answering, a recovery scanner is left holding a cable to a device that will not speak to it. Only a lab that can lift the chips out and read them directly has a route in. That service costs far more than the drive did.

None of this is sales-friendly on a page that also sells recovery software. We say it anyway, because the alternative is you spending an evening on driver reinstalls for a stick that died last week. Our scanner cannot read a dead controller. Neither can anyone else's, whatever the download page promises you.

The table below sorts the common names by what they actually do. Free caps are taken from the pages linked on this page, quoted so you can test before paying, not as a ranking.