Last time i ''Safty ejected'' a device was my phone two years ago, and boy did i loose 14GB of data...
I'll test it see how it goesYou could try using this free little program USB Flash Drive Tester - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com It will tell you for certain if the pendrive is faulty
I'm from Yorkshire, in UK, i just love japan :P
be suprised, it's only 3/4 month old... and it's not like it has been abused in any way over this time
You're blaming following the MANDATORY "safely remove hardware" procedure before disconnecting your phone for why you lost data, if I understand your comment correctly?
I suspect that there's far more to the story than the fact that you did what is REQUIRED PROCEDURE. For example... what type of phone was this? An Apple iPhone, connected to a Windows PC?
The purpose of "Safely Remove Hardware" is simple: it's how you tell Windows that you're about to remove a device so that Windows can finish whatever it needs to do with it. In the case of disks, for example, Windows flushes all disk buffers, avoiding things like potential corruption.
And that's the fear - if you remove something like a USB thumb drive without first telling Windows, it's possible to corrupt the contents of the drive. In practice that doesn't happen often, but it's possible.
Why do you think all computer manufacturers (including Apple) provide the equivalent of a "safely remove hardware / eject" functionality for removable devices? Surely it wasn't invented to do harm.
It's not exactly a required procedure, although it's good practice in any case. Thing is, you can disable write caching in the device settings for your USB stick (Windows even explains that "performance may be reduced but the device can be disconnected without using the Safely Remove icon).
It may (or may not) also depend on which filesystem the device is formatted with, and whether you're in a hurry to unplug the device right after finishing a read/write operation or give it a few seconds to settle down first.
So, to be sure it either is required or not, check that setting first. Windows will save the setting through disconnection and reconnection of the device, so it's persistent.
That said, the OP already reformatted his USB stick and promptly had severe corruption issues again the next day. That doesn't sound like it's just a consequence of not safely ejecting it.
All valid points. In fact I believe "write cache" for removable drives is DISABLED by default for FAT32, and ENABLED by default for NTFS. So this particular aspect of the discussion would depend on how he'd formatted his drive.
I did discover a very informative old article dealing with removable drives (looks like it was first written back in 1998 but updated as recently as 2010), which seems to discuss only WinXP. But I'm sure many/most of the principles talked about apply even to Win7.
Note in particular the section entitled "Safe Removal":An USB drive should never be removed without logging it off, especially when the drive has a write cache. The official way is thru a symbol in the systray and some mouse clicks.Anyway, as you've pointed out... reformatting the drive and trying it again has resulted immediately in lost data and/or corruption. Presumably he DID at least this time use the "safely remove" approach, and it clearly still failed.
For 'removable' drives as internal card readers the media should be 'ejected': Right click the drive in the Windows Explorer, select 'Eject' here. Under XP this is not allowed for restricted users but this can be enabled by a policy.
This strongly suggests that the flash media may actually be "worn out" (from lots of write-cycle use over time, de-frags, etc.) and now is simply and truly hardware defective.
If you look in the System Event Log you will probably find lots of errors - perhaps from some time back if you haven't deleted any of the logs. I have had errors occurring and the drive still functions but it is time to retire it if it can't be relied on.
Last edited by pincushion; 25 Nov 2011 at 06:06. Reason: add
yeah, i would, but my OS decided to fail on me, and had to be reinstalled,
I see.
So you were actually connected in "MTP mode", not "MSC mode", if I understand what "phone mode" vs. "mass storage" mode implies.
So you actually never got a Windows drive letter assigned to the phone's storage when you plugged in the phone to the PC, because that only happens with MSC connections, not MTP connections.
That also means you did not see a "safely remove hardware" object appear in the System Tray, because that is only relevant for MSC connections (when Windows assigns a drive letter to the removable device) not MTP connections.
And theoretically you're correct... you should have simply been able to pull the plug whenever you were finished with the current operation (assuming it was finished, and you didn't just pull the plug right in the middle of whatever you were doing). There is no associated "safely remove hardware" action involved with MTP connections.
So, it couldn't have been "safely remove hardware" that was responsible for your loss of 14GB of data, because you didn't invoke that function... because you didn't have to since your phone was connected in MTP mode, not MSC mode.
I guess the explanation for your data loss remains a mystery.
It will remain history...the software provided above by ''pebbly'' works great, but it doesn't fix the issue, the test says that my usb key is 98% good to write on (with 2% recoverable) and 79% readable, rest also recoverable, after i ran the test, windows kindly offered to ''fix my issue'', formatted into NTFS and seems to work fine, held my pictures overnight, and still seems to be at it... only problem is, it is no longer visable to my linux OS, but i guess i can always take those files to my 2GB and 1GB separate keys... But i think this topic should remain open, in case someone digs it up in some time, and finds a better solution.
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