On Mon, 16 May 2011 07:57:40 -0400, "Zaphod Beeblebrox"
wrote:


"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.

But you wait until you're sure it's stopped writing? If you pull it
out in the middle of writing the FAT, it will be screwed up.

I once had a portion of the directory structure screwed up, but it was
just copies of other stuff, so I went one level higher and deleted
what was below.


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.

Okay. If she would let me borrow the drive, I'd do it, but


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.

Okay.


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.

More work for me. I think she's overly worried. (She thinks if I
glimpse the file, she's failed to preserve security, even though I
don't know these kids and will never have contact with them and won't
remember much and forget all that within a couple hours. These kids
are not famous and they can't be blackmailed, and the school system
has 100,000 kids, and no one at the central office knows who any of
them are . But I'll keep this in mind for when it matters to me, not
just her. They must have given her instructions about what she
should do.

Thanks