Corrupted USB Flash Drive?

linex12

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Dec 8, 2014
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Hello, everyone! I have a problem with my USB flash drive. I need to back up my photos. The folder with the photos is 21GB and my USB drive is 32GB. When I copy all the files on the USB drive and remove it everything seems fine. But once I insert it back on the PC Windows says that the drive is corrupted. Then I remove the drive and put it back and the pictures are there. However, only the first 100 files are OK, The rest is corrupted.

Is the the Flash drive bad or I'm doing something wrong? I tried to copy the folders with the pictures one by one but the result is the same - corrupted flash drive.

Thank you in advance!
 
So one thing that I've started doing that I realize a lot of people don't is "ejecting" the usb disk drives. Sometimes drives can cache writes into ram and not actually finish writing. I've had this happen to me before and now make it a habit to eject any usb drive I write files to. Reading and not ejecting is fine but writing a ton of files and immediately pulling out the drive after windows shows complete is not always safe.
 
Typically USB drives come formatted as FAT32. If you re-format them to NTFS, you lose a little space, but they then have journaling. While it is still a good idea to safely remove hardware through ejecting/unmounting, with journaling it won't constantly tell you the drive is corrupt because it logs exactly what it is doing up to the point it is disconnected.
 
Thank you for the quick response! I'm always removing the drive safely. I know that it isn't a good practice to "pull" it out once the copying is finished. I'm always formating the USB drives to NTFS before I use them. I just don't know what to do. Maybe the drive is bad. I have never had such problems.
 
1) First, are you sure it's not a FAKE drive? Plenty exist.

2) If the drive SOFTWARE is corrupted you can try using a Low Level Format. I've done that many times, even just a month ago on a new 32GB Kingston as it went wonky after I used it to boot a Linux distro.

HERE IS the program I use http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

choose to use as FREE. will delete EVERYTHING on the USB drive, then do a FULL NTFS format (not quick)

3) LLF doesn't prove the drive is actually a real 32GB drive though.
Try using MACRORIT for a USB drive. I like that it shows the sectors:
http://macrorit.com/disk-surface-test/disk-surface-test.html

See if it actually shows 32GB.
 
1) I AM sure that it's fake. It's 100% Chinese drive.

2) I'm using Windows's tools to format and repair it so I suppose the it works fine. I may try your suggestion.

3) Macrorit shows that the drive is 32.25GB, so that's not the problem.