Invisible wrote:
> Yeah, but AFAIK you only write to the superblock when you initially 
> format the volume?

Hmmm... On FAT? I'm not sure. There might be a flag there that marks 
whether the drive was dismounted cleanly or not. Or if you screw up the 
root directory, I can see that mucking things up too. If there were just 
a couple of directories, and the first sector of the root directory got 
scrambled because she pulled it out while it was writing, I can see that 
messing things up.

> I can understand a file or folder being broken, but the entire FS?

FAT usually has two FATs, too, for just such a reason. It's possible she 
got a warning that the first was broken and just ignored it until the 
second got messed up too.

I'm not real sure of the electrical characteristics of a USB stick such 
that it gets the whole chip messed up by being pulled out while writing, 
but I have to believe avoiding that was one of the design goals.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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