On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:50:23 +0100, Invisible wrote:

> Well, well... It appears one of our employees kept "everything" on a USB
> flash drive. And guess what? Yah, that's right. Now every time she tries
> to use that drive, it says the drive isn't formatted.
> 
> I have no idea why a working drive would suddenly do this,

I've read reports that flash storage devices have a limited number of 
write cycles before they become bricks.  I had set up one device with a 
journaling filesystem and had several people comment that this was a bad 
idea because of the limited-use nature of this type of device.

Easy test:  Plug it into another computer and see if you can read it.  If 
you can, it's her PC; if you can't, it's the drive.

Jim

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Invisible wrote:
> Dodgy, much?

No. Free samples. If the free version doesn't work, you just saved the 
cost of paying for something that won't work.

No more dodgey than giving away the first level of a game for free, I'd 
think.

> Copying the entire filesystem off the drive should be a simple matter 
> for dd. 

Assuming the hardware is physically OK, yeh.

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

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> I've read reports that flash storage devices have a limited number of 
> write cycles before they become bricks.

  No need to read "reports". Just read the specs of the flash storage
device.

  However, modern flash storage devices (which work properly) can be
rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any
signs of malfunction.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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I'd suggest using ddrescue to (hopefully) image the drive first, then possibly
photorec to try and recover files.  Sysresccd contains these tools and is awesome.

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On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:35:10 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> I've read reports that flash storage devices have a limited number of
>> write cycles before they become bricks.
> 
>   No need to read "reports". Just read the specs of the flash storage
> device.

<sigh>

I had asked questions about using a journaling filesystem and it was 
told.  Yes, I could've read the specs but I didn't.  So shoot me.

Oh, wait, you just did.

>   However, modern flash storage devices (which work properly) can be
> rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any
> signs of malfunction.

The number I heard was 10,000.  With a JFS, that can happen fairly 
quickly.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
>> rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any

> The number I heard was 10,000. 

It depends on the manufacturing. 10,000 used to be a good number a 
couple of years ago. (Originally it was closer to 1000.) Newer versions 
do more, with development driven by things like cell phones needing to 
store text messages and etc in flash.

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

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On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:01:04 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any
> 
>> The number I heard was 10,000.
> 
> It depends on the manufacturing. 10,000 used to be a good number a
> couple of years ago. (Originally it was closer to 1000.) Newer versions
> do more, with development driven by things like cell phones needing to
> store text messages and etc in flash.

Makes sense. :)

Jim

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> She's one of these people who has an attitude that she's important or 
> something, and everybody else had better recognise that.
> 

The data on that stick is not recoverable.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> Even so, you would think there would have to be some kind of *cause* for 
> this. The broken drive has been tried on another machine and found to 
> not work there either. However, the person made a comment about a second 
> USB drive having recently failed in exactly the same way. This makes me 
> rather suspicious...
> 

She might be removing[1] them without removing[2] them.

[1] Physically
[2] By the eject -command

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:48b3dff5$1@news.povray.org...

> A quick search with Google reveals an Aladdin's cave of flashy programs
> that promise to get your data back. If you pay money, anyway. Even the
> ones with "FREE!" splashed all over them are actually just demo versions
> that show you the files it could get back if you just pay up with real
> money first. Or maybe you can only recover the first 100 files. Or only
> files under 10 KB in size. Or some other arbitrary limitation to force
> you to buy the full deal.
>
> Dodgy, much?
>
> There are dozens of flashy programs that claim to reconstruct
> filesystems, but they all cost money.

Yes. Such is life. Bread costs money. Milk costs money. Electricity costs
money. Coffee costs money. And so *drum roll*, software costs money.
Programmers are not magicians, they need money to live just like everybody
else. So what's wrong with *paying* for software? Do you call bakers "dodgy"
too because they may give you a bite size sample but they don't give you
whole loaves of bread for free?

Of course it's not your fault that you have no respect for software
developers, it's their own making. The problem with is that academics have
given away too much for too long, and they can afford to do that because
they are not giving away their own time but government's or the
institution's time. Contrast this with, say, milk. There are no government
funded farmer academicians who take it upon themselves to give out free
milk, not that the same thing would even work for physical goods.

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