I have a Sandisk 128GB USB drive which appears totally unreadable in Windows 10. When queried, the drive will lock Windows File Explorer up, and sit there until the USB is removed. I tried this on three Windows machines.

I booted Ubuntu 20.04 and the USB drive then became readable. The drive was then backed up onto a HD partition folder. I assume it copied everything, but how can I recover the drive content aside from hard formatting it?

I ran both dosfsdk and fsck.vfat several times on it, but they both always appear to terminate early with just a GOT nnnn bytes instead of xxxxx message.

The following is the latest terminal output:

aqk@Giga-Ubuntu:~$ sudo dosfsck -a -t -w -r -l -v /dev/sdc1       

[sudo] password for aqk: XXXXXX    

fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) 

Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem 

Boot sector contents:   

System ID "        "   

Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)     

        512 bytes per logical sector    

      32768 bytes per cluster        

         14 reserved sectors 

First FAT starts at byte 7168 (sector 14)  

          2 FATs, 32 bit entries   

 15159808 bytes per FAT (= 29609 sectors) 

Root directory start at cluster 2 (arbitrary size) 

Data area starts at byte 30326784 (sector 59232)   

  3789922 data clusters (124188164096 bytes) 

63 sectors/track, 255 heads 

    2 hidden sectors  

242614240 sectors total     

***Got 6743040 bytes instead of 15159696 at 7168***            

Are there any other utilities that can recover this USBdrive "as is", or will I be forced to fully format it?