[danmurdoch]

I have a large capacity USB drive. I place the drive into my computer and copy all of my folders onto the USB to backup. They copy fine and the size of the folders copied onto the USB drive are the same as the source on the computer.

Then I take the USB drive out of the computer (safely) and then replace it into the computer again and the various folders appear on the USB drive but there is nothing in them with the exception of 2 unrecognizable files which do not contain any data. The name of these files is δXÉMSDOS.5.0. I have attached a screen shot of the files inside each folder.

If I transfer a file over to the USB drive iot seems to stay there but if a folder is involved it will not work. I also cannot delete the new files and folders that appear in the USB drive.

Please help me.

Thanks

[Hughv]

What's the make and model of this drive?
Many of them come with all kinds of weird security software that may be tripping you up. Did you get a manual or CD with the drive?
Try formating it.

[danmurdoch]

It is a generic brand. I have re formatted it many times and can only format it in FAT 32 as it says the drive it too big for any other.

[Hughv]

Too big? What's the exact message?
How are you formatting it?

[lister]

Is it a flash drive? Some untrustworthy types are selling fake capacity drives on ebay.
http://reviews.ebay.com/BEWARE-of-FA...00000001236200

[danmurdoch]

No it is genuinely 32Gb I checked it and there are no virus etc etc on the drive. The folders all copy over to the drive then when I take the drive out and then put it back in to the computer again, there is either nothing in the folders or there are unrecognizable files in the folders, such as the sample I have attached in my first post. I have re formatted the disk many times using a HP format tool. I can only format it to FAT32 as the drive is too large the tool says.

I think it may be something to do with partioning or XP or something like that but I really do not know.

Dan

[saikee]

Quote in the eBay

More than 95% of all 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB USB Flash Drives listed on eBay are counterfeit items and have fake & overstated capacities. All 32GB USB Flash Drives are FAKE.

Has the hammer hit right on the nail head this time? A genuine product should be recognisable and formattable by XP I would have thought.

[danmurdoch]

No there are many 32Gb USB drives out there, Toshiba, Sony etc etc and I have checked the drive with more than 20Gb o data and it accepts all of the data and I can open and view all of the contents on the drive. It is when I take it out of the computer and replace it that there is a problem. It is a strange problem I agree.

Dan

[danmurdoch]

Also if I place files on the drive they are all ok it is just foldes that is causing a problem.

[saikee]

Are folders with English names OK?

[danmurdoch]

Yes all with English names.

[saikee]

I would suggest you seek a second opinion.

Boot up a free Linux Live CD, that can run without being installed into the hard disk. All Linux can read and write fat32 partitions. If you get Slax, downloadable as an iso from its web site so that you can burn it into a bootable CD, it will mount all your partitions automatically so that you can see the content of each.

This Linux terminal command tells you every partition in every hard disk as seen by Linux. Even a raw disk or a bad disk totally unreadable with a corrupted partition table cannot be excluded from the display.

fdisk -l

If you see 32Gb reported by Linux your disk is good.

While MS systems support a handful of partition types of fat and ntfs a Linux supposrts 100+ partition types.

[danmurdoch]

That is great I will try and accomplish this and walk myself through it. I appreciate it.

Dan