$#@%! (Universally Serious Bullsh*t)

[Jeimuzu73]

My good ol' USB which has everything on it is starting to wear on me. I can't create new folders, save files or even play songs.
Windows Explorer and other programs just cease to function, reinserting the USB doesn't work and I can't exactly copy all my stuff onto the C drive either, so I'm very screwed. Any hints outta this mess?

[ShadowTiger]

Can you boot from an external operating system, like Ubuntu or Fedora? At a minimum, there's no way explorer can crash on you.

[Nevander]

Like above said, I would suggest using an another OS on your own or on another computer to attempt to access the USB. At that point I'd immediately backup everything on it that I cared about. Maybe the USB is fine and Windows is the problem. It may work fine in another OS, given that you said it screws with Windows Explorer. I've never known a faulty USB to actually crash Explorer, but I could be wrong.

[Jeimuzu73]

I tried safe mode, the library computers, same issues. Another big problem is that the disk starts off as normal and later just reverts to an "empty" disk, and when I try to find the disk in Command Prompt it says "Path not found - E:\". I don't normally go mad at things like this, but WTF!

[XanderK9]

I've never known a faulty USB to actually crash Explorer, but I could be wrong.

I did in my tech days, but that was very rare and some cases even made Windows giving a BSOD the instant I connect the drive.

As long the drive or the partition is not totally broken, I was usually able to recover data under Linux or Mac OS without too much hassle.

[Kinsie]

You can swear here, you know.

But speaking of, one of my old backup external USB drives is giving me "YO THIS ISN'T FORMATTED" messages on both Windows 10 and OSX Yosemite. Is there any chance I can salvage the contents, and if so, can someone explain how to me like I'm a five year old? Cheers.

[Abba Zabba]

I, too, know the pain of memory media taking a crap, but my external HD was at least partially working so I could save the important stuff before it finally kicked it. The general rule of thumb for myself to prevent future shenanigans is to 1: back it up onto an internal HD (I have yet to have an issue with internals) and 2: back it up online. Make this routine for yourself, and best of luck getting the damn thing to cooperate with you.

[Graf Zahl]

Are these problems sudden or did they develop over time?

Normally, when any kind of storage media is repeatedly showing reliability problems, even slight ones, the first course of action should be a complete backup.

Just a few weeks ago the SD card in my digital camera suddenly had some issues, prompting the camera to say 'no card inserted' or having to plug it into my computer 3 times before it could be read. The first thing I did was copy all its contents to my HD and buy a new one. Good thing I did so because two weeks later it can't be read at all anymore.

The lesson here:

If you got a storage medium with "everything on it", it's time to reconsider your attitude. Always keep a backup of important stuff, it doesn't really matter if you store it on an USB stick, a second HD or in some online cloud storage. Just make sure you can eventually retrieve everything if it craps out on you.

[Jeimuzu73]

*groan*
It only started to happen last night...
I couldn't even back it up and now TARFUBAR.
I think there's even a virus that's causing the trouble, and I can't scan the damn disk.

Hmm...on a more positive note, I just plugged the USB into the lab computer which uses Linux and so far no issues are encountered unlike with Windows. Interesting...

[zZaRDoZz]

I suppose this has already gone beyond anything isobuster can help with?

[phantombeta]

Hmm...on a more positive note, I just plugged the USB into the lab computer which uses Linux and so far no issues are encountered unlike with Windows. Interesting...

Partially corrupted filesystem? Or maybe driver problems?
No idea if the former is like this...

But speaking of, one of my old backup external USB drives is giving me "YO THIS ISN'T FORMATTED" messages on both Windows 10 and OSX Yosemite. Is there any chance I can salvage the contents, and if so, can someone explain how to me like I'm a five year old? Cheers.

I think this can be a corrupted filesystem or partition table... Not sure, though...

[edward850]

But speaking of, one of my old backup external USB drives is giving me "YO THIS ISN'T FORMATTED" messages on both Windows 10 and OSX Yosemite. Is there any chance I can salvage the contents, and if so, can someone explain how to me like I'm a five year old? Cheers.

See if chkdsk can recover it. It'll claim it's RAW, but sometimes you strike lucky and it'll figure it out.
Failing that, there's this tool.

[Jeimuzu73]

Begun the long, gruelling task of copying files to a new drive. Forget what I said earlier about the drive having no errors on Linux - I can't shift whole gigabytes of data in one go and the disk no longer becomes recognized after a few minutes. I've recovered some photos, some important word documents and programs but as for others such as music, sprites and sounds I will have to rebuild my entire collections from scratch. That includes the GZDoom folder as well.

Man, I really broke the egg basket big-time.

If the file system inside the USB is corrupted, is there a way to fix it?

[edward850]

Format it. Suddenly the old file system doesn't even matter.
That's assuming you even can. What you're describing can sometimes be attributed to a flash drive that has run out of cells to write to, as flash memory will over time, or a mechanical drive that has suffered head-on-platter damage from physical movement, resulting in unaddressable sections of said platters. Explorer will appear to lockup as it waits for a timeout from the bad sectors.

[Jeimuzu73]

It seems that the only way I can get around this is to painstakingly transfer minute amounts of important data into my new drive one at a time. *groan* oh Cripes, I really don't want to rebuild my music, sound and sprite libraries again... Once I get everything I need out of there, I'll format the bastard to kingdom come.

On top of that, AVG just spotted a trojan horse in a folder in my old drive! That and the other crap I filled in might be the culprit to this mess.