"Do you want to scan and fix" nag popup

When I connect a USB thumb drive to my laptop this alert pops up



When I connect a USB portable spinner there is no popup

In Disable Scan and Fix for Removable Drives in Windows article by How-To-Geek, it "blames" the problem on failing to use "Safely remove"
- I use USB thumb drives to move files between a Linux machine and a Win7 PC.
- Linux Mint has a Safely Remove feature but it does not give an OK message (ever). Could that be a problem ?
- I always use "Safely remove", is it possible to fix the "Do you want to scan and fix" nag popup, without disabling AutoPlay ?
- The nag is an irritation when I am busy

Would appreciate any help. :)

Did you ever scan and fix it ?

You should not be getting that all the time.

Safely removed the USB-TD -- connected the same USB device again but this time clicked on "Fix it!"
- the result was ...



Safely removed the USB thumb drive again ... copied an EML file from Linux machine ... safely removed USB TD from Linux machine.
Connected USB-TD to Win7 PC ... no more nags.

Nothing like when all else fails "read the instructions"
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I notice two oddities that are beyond my knowledge ...
1. There are less KBs available than total disc space ?
2. There are less units available than total units available on the disc/drive ? (Sectors ?)

USB format is FAT32
- are some of the sectors "faulty" ? Or are the "missing" KBs/units used by the drive's file-system ?

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SPECS:
Toshiba Satellite C665
Win7 Home Premium 32bit

bawldiggle said:

I notice two oddities that are beyond my knowledge ...
1. There are less KBs available than total disc space ?
2. There are less units available than total units available on the disc/drive ? (Sectors ?)

USB format is FAT32
- are some of the sectors "faulty" ? Or are the "missing" KBs/units used by the drive's file-system ?

The sectors aren't faulty. That's some of the drive's internal housekeeping at work. Remember that 1K of data is not 1000 bytes, it is 1024 bytes. It's the same as regular hard disks, the formatted capacity is always smaller than the listed size of the drive. Same for a USB drive.

Explorer.exe is hiccuping with the USB sticks. I had this same trouble from time to time with both USB sticks and with external usb hard-drives [platter-clatter]. The ultimate solution, which is working so far, was to copy off anything you want to keep; format usb sticks [if they are fat32, leave 'em that way], format platter-clatter hard-drives [use default NTFS 4096 or whatever defaults called for], format again. Test by copy some little file onto those devices, copy that file from those devices. If those thingies are being used for backups, it is very important that explorer.exe plays very nice with external media devices.