My pendrive was ok this lunch, but when I tried to run it in the afternoon (on a laptop) it said it had no files. Other computers also say this.

However, when I right-click and go to properties, it says that 198mb is used, and 51.3 mb is free!

Someone help. I have valuable school work on here!

Also, when I went to the School's ICT department, they ran a file recovery thing, which said that it had found many files, most of which were wav's and one excel document.

I HAD NO WAV'S ON IT!!!! I'M SCREWED!!!!! SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!!!

This is the main reason why you should never use pen drives as primary storage.

You could try booting up Knoppix and reading the USB disk, and it might show the files there. You could back up to a share on your network, if you have one, or another pen drive, or copy to RAM and then format the USB disk, then copy it from RAM on to the disk.

Alternatively, if you are using Windows, you might want to try using the DOS command [i]recover[/i]. type [i]recover /?[/i] at the command prompt for more information.

Being technically incompetant, can you explain that please - how to copy ram?

Also, I set my pen drive to boot up with that option screen (do nothing, open, etc).

Yet, when I take it out and then put it back in, it seems to forget I have told it to do this.

Hmm, sounds a bit messed up, do you have any backups? Cos you are likely going to have to format it.

Your best bet would be what aaron says. As for copying it to RAM, you could just copy it to any shared drive if using Knoppix (Linux - Live probably).