So I was using a portable app (PhotoFiltre) on my flash drive, closed it, then removed the flash drive. I recieve a write error from WinXP. I put the drive back in, now that program plus half of my flash drive showed up as corrupt when trying to open the files.
I then removed the flash drive, then put it back in. Now when I try to open the drive, it says "Insert disk".
I tried accessing the drive thru the Admin Tools ->Disk Managerment, no luck.
This is the 3rd time this has happen to me. It use to happen alot when I streamed mp3s from my flash drive, 2 drives died that way. I stopped doing that, but now it happen when using a portable app.
Someone on another forum posted this, from what the home page says on this site, this isnt TRUE right?
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"portables" are meant to be run when u dont have your pc handy.
"portables" are meant to be run from your pc since they dont require installation.
"portables" are NOT meant to be run consistently off flash drives which have a smallish (sort of) read/write life.
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Any ideas what I can do?
Viking 512MB USB 2.0 flash drive
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There's a simple solution to all this: don't pull the drive without using the "safely remove hardware" tray icon! If your drives are this corrupted, I don't think there's much you can do, so you'll have to buy a new one... but please, from now on, use the the "safely remove hardware" icon.
Windows has (2) settings for removable media. The one I was using doesnt require you to use the "safely remove hardware" icon. Is that the setting that portable apps need?
You should still use the safe removal icon just to be sure. That first option in the properties, "Optimize for quick removal", only disables write caching; if you pull the drive while a program is writing to it (Firefox, for instance, can take a bit to completely close as it has to write out a few files before terminating), you can still corrupt it.
Iff you want to recover the data from your stick I suggest you have a look at a linux live distro, eg Knoppix and likes. Specially with kernel 2.4, this does the trick off finding data on drives wich even arent read anymore with kernel 2.6 or windows... you just have to save the disks content to your home drive off your installed linux partition or put it on a cdrom or usb stick.
But what if it sayes generic volume cant be stopped
If you try a few times (usually about 3) and it still doesn't work, then you can pull it, because by that point anything still in the write-behind cache will most likely have been written to the drive. Always try safe removal first, though.
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Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
~ Spectacles: Bruce's Story
If it's corruptted, you can format it. You don't have to buy a new one. However, if the PC can't format it, you're SOL, and will have to buy a new one. Never, ever pull a usb drive out until it is safe (i.e. nothing is using a file on the drive).
Vintage!
to format the drive as NTFS, then hopefully it would only hose the file that was being written to at the time rather than corrupting the whole drive.
I love it. My drive is formatted with NTFS, and it's wonderful. The only problem is that it can't be used with Linux... yet.
go to command line
convert : /FS:NTFS /NoSecurity
Have fun! Smaller cluster size, too. That means less space will be used on disk.
Vintage!
It won't even hose the single file. NTFS's logging system makes it so that a change to a file is either completely written or not written at all. If the drive is accidentally pulled in the middle of a write, you'll likely just end up with the old version of the file (before it was saved).
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Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
~ Spectacles: Bruce's Story
I guess is better to use PC Inspector (www.pcinspector.de) then with pcinspector smart recovery you can try a recover of the data lost (it will take about 2 hours, for your stick) and then format it to fat32.
Good luck
Why the heck would I want to reformat my drive for FAT32 when it's already formatted for NTFS? NTFS is far superior to FAT32 as long as you don't need to use the drive on win9X/ME machines. I run more risk of losing my files due to accidentally pulling the drive with FAT32 than I do with NTFS.
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Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
~ Spectacles: Bruce's Story
In my opinion its more common, still sigh..., to have available (at least here in italy) a win9x/ME than win XP. Over here the computer is still something nearly unknown in most of the place, inspite of all the blabla about modern technologies.
NTFS may kill ur flash drive. It alwayes updates the file system and tables so it writes to ur flash drive more
It doesn't update the tables any more often than FAT/FAT32. The MFT is only touched when a file is modified (whether the modification be a write, creation, or deletion). FAT's file allocation table is the same.
Think before you say these stupid things: if FAT didn't "update its tables all the time," like you say NTFS does, I suspect you'd end up with lots of lost clusters.
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Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
~ Spectacles: Bruce's Story