On Mon, 16 May 2011 12:16:02 -0400, Christopher Muto
wrote:

On 5/16/2011 6:16 AM, mm wrote:

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.

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

What's the next step? Running chkdsk?

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?


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.

no cross=posting please.

sounds like her computer is the problem and not the drive. has she
tried to reboot and only then plug the usb drive back in? has she tried
the drive in another machine? also, the usb socket that the usb drive
did not fit into is probably a firewire slot, not a usb slot. and once

No, it was USB because the mouse works fine in it. It just had part
of the case hanging over it like an awning, and it was fatter than
most. It probably has a case and inside it is the same size as the
others. But it was cheap, 16 dollars for 8gigs I think. So it won't
hurt her to put it in the other jack.

Thanks, and thanks everyone.


she copies the data to some other source, she should copy it into
another computer (two copies) prior to deleting it from the laptop
otherwise she can not be sure her copy worked and/or is backed up. only
then should she delete the data from the laptop and then wipe the laptop
with a utility like boot and nuke to ensure that this confidential data
does not fall into the wrong hands.