USB flash memory

[Greg Booth]

On 7/31/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Greg Booth wrote:
>
> > On 7/31/07, Neil Winchurst <neil at holsdev.vispa.com> wrote:
> >> I have never tried using any flash memory sticks or such like. Does
> >> anyone have any comments, warnings, advice etc please?
> >>
> >> (Kubuntu Edgy, if that is useful).
> >
> > Never, EVER just unplug them, ALWAYS eject them safely. This goes for
> > all operating systems. Yanking it out is a great way to guarantee
> > you'll end up with a dead stick.
>
> You'll practically never end up with a dead stick.  Perhaps a seriously
> wounded one (I once had to download a Windows program to fix one).
>
> But you may very well lose data, as the data is usually not written
> immediately to the stick, as they have a limited number of writes
> available.
> --
> derek

Had the same problem here. Was in a huge rush, said "ah it won't do
anything !" yanked it, got to work and look at that ! NO FILES !! It
asked me if I wanted to format it; of course canceled out of that.
Went out and downloaded a nice free program ( yes, windows, but I
couldn't find anything else ! ) and recovered all the files from it,
reformatted it fat32 and copied everything back.

It took me five HOURS to fix it, but no it wasn't completely dead. And
if I didn't already have the know how to mess with stuff like this ( 5
am trying to figure out how to get into that unbootable hard drive to
recover data ) I'd have probably given up and bought a new one and
pronounced it dead.

Greg