[ale] OT: recovering usb thumb drive

[william at fragakis.com (William Fragakis)]

A teacher at our school has physically damaged a usb thumb drive -
accidentally knocked into it while it was sticking out of the computer.
Sadly, this thumbdrive held a lot of original (ie not backed up)
material. Is recovery possible and/or cost effective?

(All her student PCs are Linux so that's my justification for asking
here other than you guys/gals tend to be well informed and clever plus
we plugged it into a Linux server and it didn't show up - I guess does
that make it a Linux issue? ;-) 
)

Regards,
William