USB Flash Drives certainly have become very popular in the last couple of years. I have read in various places that I need to use the safely remove hardware device feature in Windows before removing the flash drive. My expectation was if I were to yank out the drive without going through the safely remove hardware device feature, the worse that could happen was the file I worked on becoming corrupt.
Boy was I ever wrong.
Today, when I plugged my USB Flash Drive to my computer, I got a very unsettling message explaining that the device is unformatted. I was shocked: how can this technology be so fragile? I have some files on the drive that, while not irreplaceable or very important, took me time to put together. Long story short, I found a forum message that suggest someone with a similar problem to mine to try a software called TestDisk. It is a software "designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again". It's also free!
With a text-based UI, while it's not the prettest software in the world, I was able to easily use it to recover the missing FAT16 partition on my USB Drive quickly without any trouble.
USB Flash Drives may be convenient, they are also surprising prone to corruption. While ideally, you would want to use the safely remove hardware device feature every time, sometimes things happen and TestDisk may be able to save your files.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
I usually just pull out my USB without the "safely remove" button. Haven't encountered any problems so far!
Post a Comment