Have You Had A Flash Drive or Memory Card That Got Corrupted?

I couldn't use the external hard drive for anything. I didn't attempt to use recovery software. But something tells me that I would not have been able to because the only message that would come up when I would connect it was the, 'blah blah blah corrupt. You must reformat...' I'd plug it out, and plug it back in, my computer would freeze for a few minutes, and then when I'd try to open the folder, the message would come up. The prompt won't go away until you reformat and start anew.

 

The only faulty flash drive that I've owned came from my bank for free. It was a 32gb and I was stocked because I was young and dumb after making a new account. I put some important information up on it and connected it to my PC and saw that it wasn't there anymore. Thankfully, I had a friend that knew a thing or two and got a recovery program and got the files back. After I got the information back from the flash drive. The crap hardware went straight into the trashcan where it belonged.

 

What's strange - and even a little infuriating for me - is that these external flash drives can cost a lot of money, and the whole point of them is to back up or store date. When they stop doing that, they defeat their own purpose. So when I speak to people about their experiences with external flash drives and almost every one of those people tell me that they've experienced problems with corruption, where they have had to wipe everything, I'm just like what?? Why are they so volatile??

 

Use to get this all the time! My way of preventing future corrupt flash drives or memory card is to keep my own computer bug free, and to scan all the files first before ever opening any of them on a device. I lost so much data because I was lazy and stupid, but I learned from my mistakes. Also, if it's really important data, back it up - i cannot stress this fact enough.

 

Nope, but there have been a few times where I lost data because I forgot to check the "safely remove hardware" on my USB. However, you remind me of a time where I was in China and I bought this decently sized USB for a cheap price, got home, and found that it doesn't work. Serves me right for not checking before I buy. At least I didn't lose that much money.

 

I would always safely remove my external hard drive. I do it with the smaller - lower in GB - flash drives too, because I am tat afraid of losing all of my date that I make sure that I follow all of the rules in order to minimize the risk of anything happening. And I still experienced corrupt drives that I had to wipe clean in the end. So I am not sure whether that effects the whole thing. I do think that having a computer that isn't buggy may have something to do with it though.

 

There have been numerous times when I have ventured to eject the flash drives the safe way and it will tell me that it cannot - at the moment - because the flash drive is busy. So I wait, and the next time I do try to safely eject it, it says the same thing, so then I am forced to just pull it out. What is strange is that the flash will often say that it is busy, when I often haven't even used it for anything yet. I'm thinking that it is the registry of windows 7 that is corrupt, and so it will easily corrupt your flash drives.

 

I do have an old Lexar memory stick that looks like it's pretty close to dying. I've reflashed it so many times, with many different Linux distros, probably used all the cycles that way. I'm pretty sure that's the only one I've burned out so far.

 

Hmmm. You may have a point, Sidney. Though I am not sure what else could be running. I recently wiped my laptop and re installed Windows 7 on it. I felt like that would fix a lot of the issues that I was experiencing, but for some reason it seems to have deteriorated pretty quickly. Sometimes the operating system stalls. I am putting i down to me not installing the windows updates as often as I probably should. I find that if you don't update the windows drivers, then that can and will also effect when you enter and eject a flash drive. Still, I wish that these things were not so finicky.

 

I had a micro SD card that got corrupted once. I was upset because there was years and years worth of music in there. There a good portion of those songs that I will never get back. I feel like it came out of nowhere but on the other hand, I totally saw it coming. The phone that I was using the SD card with had so many problems. It would do things like skip songs on it's own, and never play the song all the way through even though the song would work perfectly. Sometimes, the song would be playing at a noticeably slower rate than it was suppose to be. I'm a lot more careful when it comes to those things now because I don't want to lose a huge chunk of music again.

 

Thanks again for the advice I am not sure; when I don't install the updates for a long time, certain aspects on windows cease to work properly, or they begin to operate in a really buggy manner? Then after the updates, everything seems to run smoothly again. That is assuming that the updates aren't buggy to begin with, because as you have stated above, they can be. They also take too long, and then when you reboot your computer again, you have to wait for it to load up according to how many updates were installed before it was closed down. The whole thing just takes too long. I constantly check out what is going on on my computer in the task manager, but I'm afraid to end any of the processes because I know that doing that can also cause problems with the windows registry.

 

I have never had a flash drive that became corrupt but I currently have a slightly malfunctioning flash drive. I really don't know why or how the flash drive started to give problems but what it does is that it auto ejects and auto installs itself, so, when I plug it in, it connects, disconnects and does the same for as long as I have it in the computer, any help anyone? how do I stop it from doing that?

 

I know. I never mess with any of those processes. Like you mentioned above, I'll only consider terminating standalone processes. But even the message that comes up when you go to end one of those processes is scary lol. It says something about possibly making Windows unstable? Even if that isn't the problem, I feel like registry issues are much too easy to incur where computers are concerned. I installed a registry cleaner, but that just seemed to bug my computer all the more. Thank God I didn't pay for it lol.