[Cliche]

Flash memory still retains your data even though it is not being reported by the OS.

Here is the PITA way to recover.

Norton Ghost 2008 or anything else that will do a sector copy of the flash drive in question to another hard disk drive, and use a partition recovery tool to attempt to restore the original partition. (This is useful because if you pooch the data, you can always try copying everything again)

Of course, that's only if you have formated the drive with FAT32/16. No idea for Mac's journaling system, or for some of the other semi-compatible file systems out there.

(I have done the above to recover USB flash drives, and an SD memory card.)

Usually the problem that occurs when you toast your key is that the memory that contains the partition or file information is usually overwritten or written incompletely, either through sudden power surges, your computer turning off mid-write, or just yanking the darn thing out when it's still flashing.