I bought an 8gb Cruzer drive awhile back to backup some of our more important files (old pictures, videos of the kid, etc.) Now I want to use it to back up some more stuff so I can wipe my hard drive and upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7.
It is behaving really oddly, though, and I’m wondering if anyone can shed any light on this.
When I plug it in, it works fine for about 1 or 2 minutes. I can browse every folder, look at documents, look at pictures, etc. The only problem I have when I first plug it in is that is seems like all the music I have on it is damaged; it used to work fine, and now none of it will play. After that first minute or two, it starts to slow down, then files start disappearing, folders start coming up empty, and then next time I click on something it will say “Please insert a disk in drive F:”.
Unplug it, plug it back in. Unplug it, reboot, plug it back in. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s the same thing every time.
The standard “fix” I’m getting through googling is to format it, but I don’t want to lose what’s on there, and 2 minutes isn’t long enough to copy it onto my hard drive. It’ll start copying, and then stop and say “Could not move [whatever file]: The parameter is incorrect.”
I’ve tried this on 3 different computers, by the way.
The drive definitely has a problem of some sort. It might just be data corruption, which a format would fix, but it seems much more likely to me that the drive has a physical hardware problem. I don’t know that there’s much you can do to recover the files except to keep grabbing them in 2 minute bursts and get what you can off of it. You might get a bit more time if you stick it in the freezer for a while first. Then again, that also might destroy it completely.
Thumb drives are not reliable, especially in the long term. You should never use them for backup devices of critical data.
All but one of my flash drives do exactly the same thing. I think it has to do with crappy USB ports. Try it on a different computer. My bad USB ports were on a COMPUSA branded PCI board. Its USB ports not only didn’t work right with non-externally powered devices, it also made the motherboard USB ports flaky.
If these usb drives are being used on Windows based computers, you might want to try running the repair programs at the Microsoft Fix It center. Here, look under hardware. When you run the program it’ll let you know if hardware is the issue, so you’ll be able to rule that out if it isn’t.
Back everything up to HD ASAP and test elsewhere to see if it works. If you determine that it is broken, Sandisk has a 5 year warranty on them if it’s a Blade or 2 years maybe if the regular model.
pre-installed in a non-removable partition for your convenience. Even a format won’t remove it. Grrr… I had to download a removal tool. Anyway, I don’t know if this U3 code is in any way related to your problem or not. I just wanted to bitch about it.
As suggested up-thread, try it on another computer. If you don’t have access to another computer, try booting from a Linux Live CD and see if you can copy your files off that way.
Agreed. A backup should be that, a second version of the files kept somewhere else. Just coping the files to something and deleting the originals doesn’t make them any safer. And check your backups to make sure they work and are still there. That last point brought to you from the voice of experience …
As to your problem, you’ve tried three machines so it’s the drive itself (although couldn’t hurt to try a fourth, or a different OS, or whatever). It sounds physical which is bad news. Does the connector look OK? Nothing stuck in there? Does it still slide and click out? My Cruzer sometimes doesn’t make a good connection as the slider doesn’t click in place – that gives odd results.
You could try getting a sector-by-sector disk copy tool and copy the disk to another drive or an image file. That might avoid any issues, or at least allow you to do it in two minute blocks. I don’t know of the best software to do that off the top of my head but somebody else might.