"mm" wrote in message
...

A friend may have removed her USB flash drive without the proper
procedure, just pulled it out.

A) If you haven't written to the flash drive for, say, 10 minutes,
and
you know all your writes concluded 10 minutes ago, do you really
have
to use that procedure? I can't remember, and her know-it-all son
says
No.


Know-it-all son is correct. I still do it, mostly out of habit I
suppose. That, and I don't like the warnings Windows puts up if you
don't.


B) She can read from the drive but not write to it.

That is a classic flash memory failure mode - the memory cells that
make up the drive have a certain number of write/erase cycles before
they no longer respond to the erase command. So if the file
allocation table is what fails, what you can end up with is a
read-only device like hers (and since the file allocation table is a
particularly frequently modified part of the drive, for cheap drives
without a good "wear leveling" scheme to keep from wearing out a cell
or group of cells before the rest, it is a particlularly common
section to have fail that way).


What's the next step? Running chkdsk?


It probably couldn't make things any worse, but I doubt it will help.


C) She has to keep her client records for years to come. Should
she
also burn CD's to hold them. Should she print them out?


If these records are that important she should be using multiple
backups, and multiple media types sure wouldn't be a bad idea. Not
sure I'd print them, personally.


Interestingly, she bought a second USB flash drive and it wouldnt'
work either. It didn't display the slightest message when she
plugged
it in. The guy at Office Depot where she bought it said her OS was
old (she has XP SP2, but she didnt' remember that.) and he said it
couldn't find the drivers! Turns out the drive was too fat to go
into
one USB slot, but it worked fine in the other!


She's retiring in two weeks and she has to take all her personal and
client files off the Board of Education laptop, so she'll have a
copy.
And she has to remove them all so whoever sees the computer next
won't
see them. The files are records of her psychological sessions with
public school students.

That being the case, I'd suggest that after she removes those records
she should use a "shredder" type application that overwrites free /
deleted space on the drive to make it harder for someone to recover
that highly sensitive data.

--
Zaphod

Arthur: All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's
something big and sinister going on in the world.
Slartibartfast: No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the
universe gets that.