[ubuntu-uk] File copying problem to USB flash drive

[Tony Travis]

Paul Sutton wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> David King wrote:
>> When trying to copy video files to a USB flash drive, once the file has 
>> copied over, the original gets smaller, down to either 96 bytes or 0 
>> bytes. The copy also sometimes shrinks to the same size.
>>
>> What could be causing this and how can I keep the files intact on the 
>> hard drive?
>>
>> I am using Ubuntu 9.04 on an AMD64 PC. The USB flash drive is 16 GB in size.
>>
>>
>> David King
>>
>>
>>
> I have had similar issues, copied files over only to find they havn't
> actually been copied properly,

Hello, Paul and David.

There was a flood of bogus capacity USB sticks from China recently, in 
which 2GB devices were reprogrammed to look like they were 16GB. When 
you first use them, they work fine but as they fill up used parts of the 
flash memory are overwritten. There are several M$ Windows programs you 
can use to test your sticks, but you could also use "badblocks" to do a 
destructive write test. Have a look at:

   http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/safe-sellers/

HTH,

   Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition
and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK
tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, http://www.rowett.ac.uk
mailto:a.travis at abdn.ac.uk, http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt