Seems I have screwed up. I edited the Autorun file and now eveytime I try to get into the drive I get a message that states it is not formatted and do I want to format. I click No. Is there anyway to get by this? I have tried to use the command prompt to copy the files, but I get an error.
Is there anything I can do, or am I just going to have to bite the bullet and take the loss of the info on the drive?
Dave
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autonrun.inf wouldn't cause that. Even if you somehow specified that the drive formatted in autorun.inf, you could still insert it and then choose not to run anything on insertion, open Explorer, right-click the device and choose open. If you can't get that far, the drive is actually corrupted and your editing of autorun.inf was merely coincidental.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for the quick repy John.
Well, it must be corrupted then because I still get that the drive is not formatted. Is there away around to back up what is on the drive at this point?
Dave
You can try running a disk repair utility on it. If it's a logical error, you may be able to save stuff. If it's a physical error, you may be out of luck. Unfortunately, I don't have any recommendations of what would be a good program to run on it. (I use SpinRite for hardware issues on desktop hard drives, but it only supports hard drives)
Did you happen to do an unsafe eject of it at some point? Did you unsafe eject under Win2K (which is even worse)? Unsafe ejects often result in data loss and may be so bad as to require a reformat.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for the help John.
I have WinXP and have always been careful to be sure to eject the drive before removing. It was just luck as I was getting ready to do a back up of the drive since I finally got everything setup the way I wanted.
Oh well, life goes on. Just hope I can remember everything I did...
Anyway, thanks for your time and help John and everyone else, I am just going to format the drive and move on forward. I will try a recovery tool before I format if I can find one that is free or will let me do a recovery of my USB drive.
Dave
Go to a command line terminal (Run... -> type 'cmd'), and type:
chkdsk [drive letter] /R /V
It may not work, but it's worth a shot.
Vintage!
When I ran chkdsk I got an error back that states that chkdsk is not available for RAW drives.
Never seen that before, I must be in trouble.
Thank you for helping though.
Dave
is bad I think, means it isn't formatted.
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Ryan McCue
Person 1: Oh my god. You will never believe what just happened.
Person 2: What?
Person 1: I can't remember, I've forgotten.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Windows can't read the filesystem information. See if Linux can.
Vintage!
Which Linux should I use?
I found a program called hdTune. It has a feature to check the disk for errors. http://www.hdtune.com/
For Linux try a live CD version, puppy Linux, DSL are a few I have herd of on this forum quite often. Then keep the CD in a safe place in case you need to use it again.
----
eagle scout
Technology can solve all our problems, like using a laptop for a space heater in a cold tent in the middle of winter.
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Thanks for the help. I will try your suggestions and let you know how it goes.
Dave
Well, I had to buy a program to extract the data off of the thumb drive because I wasn't able to find a free one to use that worked with USB drives.
After I had extract the data, I tried to format the drive and windows won't even format the drive. Not sure what to do with it now. Any suggestions how to save the drive?
Dave
GParted should work. I know for sure it comes with Puppy Linux. There's also a GParted rescue CD at their site.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net
Vintage!
Thanks for the suggestion. I will give it a try.
Dave
Linux should work i use. http://mcnlive.org/ and www.pclinuxos.com
between the 6 linuxes?
I dont get it.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Some people like other distros better than others. Also different distros are based upon different things like mandriva/mandrake.
I use SuSE and Mepis myself and played around with several others.
Sorry if my post wasn't clear: I was referring to the 6 different ones on http://mcnlive.org/
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate