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

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Eero "Aero" Ahonen
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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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"John VanSickle" <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote
> 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...

> It's no longer a working drive, I'd wager.

Techncially, those aren't even "drives".

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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.

Flash drive? Do you really mean flash memory, or just a USB hard disk with
the normal magnetic system?

Flash memory does "wear out". Write cycles are more limited than you may
expect.

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Kyle wrote:
> I'd suggest using ddrescue to (hopefully) image the drive first

Ditto that. Don't use plain dd. The filesystem and other stuff may refuse to
give you data, and I think dd would just halt if a sector is unreadable.
ddrescue continues and tries to copy as much as it can.

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> 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,

Also because a lot of computer programmers do it only as a hobby, and as 
such they have another source of income so don't mind if they don't get paid 
for their hobby work.  But I wonder why it is different for other hobbies 
like photography, you would never find some unknown person to do your 
wedding for free.  But people are happy to spend *years* writing code and 
then give it away for free to unknown people.  Maybe it says more about the 
sort of people who program as a hobby.

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Eero Ahonen wrote:

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

Yeah, I can see how that might corrupt the filesystem. But badly enough 
to render it unreadable? You would think you'd just get a few filesystem 
inconsistencies. The error message sounds more like the superblock is 
unreadable or something...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Jim Henderson wrote:

> 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.

Wear-leveling, anyone?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Kyle wrote:
>> I'd suggest using ddrescue to (hopefully) image the drive first
> 
> Ditto that. Don't use plain dd. The filesystem and other stuff may refuse to
> give you data, and I think dd would just halt if a sector is unreadable.
> ddrescue continues and tries to copy as much as it can.

Online resources claim there's an extra option to dd to make it skip 
unreadable blocks.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Dodgy, much?
> 
> 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?

No. But if somebody shouts "FREE STUFF!" and then carefully tricks you 
into having to actually pay money for it... to me, that's very dodgy.

If stuff costs money then fine. But don't claim something is free when 
it isn't. That's deception.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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