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Not ejecting flash drive before pulling it out? :(

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First post, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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Simple question: what the WORST could happen?

Will it damage the flash drive physically? Or just damaging the files?

I'm asking this because I just gave my flash drive to a friend to copy several files, but when I opened the flash drive on my PC, some files just become unreadable. Worse, certain folders could not be deleted (displaying 'folder not empty' error message, despite the folder IS empty). Moreover, the speed of my flash drive became unstable; sometimes it took forever to get into a folder, but some other time it didn't take much time to get into the very same folder.

This shit just never happened before. Ever. So I suspect she just forgot to eject the device before physically pulling it out (argh!).

Now I'm reformatting my flash drive (Quick Format); will it resolve the problem? Or will it happen again in the future that I need a full format? punchballs.gif

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 1 of 6, by DosFreak

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You did virus scan it right?

I always dismount my external hard drives before removing them if at all possible. I never bother to do this with flash drives though and I've never had a problem.

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Reply 2 of 6, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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DosFreak wrote:

You did virus scan it right?

Twice. The first with AVG (which I just updated this morning), and the second with NOD32. Neither detected anything. 😢

DosFreak wrote:

I always dismount my external hard drives before removing them if at all possible. I never bother to do this with flash drives though and I've never had a problem.

Well so far everything's ok after I reformatted it (Quick Format), but I'm not really sure, though. Now I'm still 'abusing' my flash drive, copying and deleting files over and over again to make sure everything's fine.

By the way, who's your avvie now?

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 3 of 6, by MiniMax

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It all depends on how/what you have done to your Windows(?) OS. Normally, Windows will recognize an USB/Flash drive as being "non-trustworthy" and will avoid caching of write-operations to the device.

Try a right-click on the Flash-drive => Hardware => Properties => Principles(?), and you should see 2 options: 1) Optimize for fast removal, 2) Optimize for performance.

I am very sure that any damage will only be logical (to the filesystem), no physical damage will occur to the stick.

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Reply 4 of 6, by DosFreak

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My Avatar is Stuntman Mike played by Kurt Russell in the movie "DeathProof" which is the second half of the movie "Grindhouse".

Poor guy.. 🙁 😁

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Reply 5 of 6, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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MiniMax wrote:

Try a right-click on the Flash-drive => Hardware => Properties => Principles(?), and you should see 2 options: 1) Optimize for fast removal, 2) Optimize for performance.

I see. Will check my notebook then. Anyway, so far the flash drive works! 😀 Just rescued my precious pr0n with it today! 😁

DosFreak wrote:

My Avatar is Stuntman Mike played by Kurt Russell in the movie "DeathProof" which is the second half of the movie "Grindhouse".

Poor guy.. 🙁 😁

But he ain't no villain, is he?

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 6 of 6, by Xian97

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Years ago I had a Syquest 44m removable hard drive. If you didn't eject it properly you could have file corruption, because as MiniMax had mentioned, some of the files might still be cached and not written to disk. SmartDrv.exe was especially bad with the Syquest so I switched to using another caching program from Central Point. The times that it occurred, mostly due to power outages, a reformat fixed the problem.

I imagine you could possibly run into the same issues today if caching was enabled on the drive and it was removed before it had been written.

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