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Originally posted by Brenda:
I screwed up my USB stick. My computer won't read it now. I did something real stupid last time I tried to use it. I pulled it out without ejecting it. I mean just pulled. So I am going to see if I can do anything with it or if I have to start from scratch.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Quote:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
I screwed up my USB stick. My computer won't read it now. I did something real stupid last time I tried to use it. I pulled it out without ejecting it. I mean just pulled. So I am going to see if I can do anything with it or if I have to start from scratch.

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Calm down, Brenda. Tell me exactly what is happening when you plug it in.

I know I probably put the fear of god in you about ejecting the drive first, but doing any actual damage to the drive happens so very rarely that I have a hard time believing this is what's just happened to you, even if you did unplug it without ejecting it.

When it did happen to me, it was catastrophic what I lost. A bad lesson I didn't have to learn twice. Up until that point, I sometimes would get a message saying "Windows found a problem with this drive", with an option to allow Windows to attempt to fix it. In every instance up until that catastrophic loss, Windows never had a problem with fixing the drives and the data was still intact. I did have one drive that continued to work fine, but every time I plugged it in after removing it without ejecting first it would give me that error and I had to have Windows fix it before I could open it.


So I need to know exactly what happens when you plug it in. Does Windows make the chime sound that it does when you put a drive in? Does your drive have an LED indicator light (and is it lighting up or flashing)? Do you get any sort of pop-ups at all when plugging in the drive, or does nothing happen at all?


I still want you to try to open the drive in Explorer and see if it shows up there even if nothing happens when you plug the drive in. It's possible that the directions Windows remembers for what to do with that drive were somehow changed, and maybe it's actually being recognized by Windows, but it's not popping up an Explorer window inside of it automatically for you anymore.

That explanation is not the most plausible, but I think it's much more plausable than your drive went bad after only pulling it out without ejecting it first only one time. Especially if your book or any photos you were looking at from the drive were all closed first before you pulled the stick out.

Sometimes windows gets all confused and won't let you eject drives because it erroneously says that there are still files that are in use. Depending on what I'm doing and which drive I'm using, a lot of times I'll just chance it and pull it out anyway (never on anything important like your book though... In that case you should just power the PC down and take it out after it turns off completely).

But make sure you never pull that thing out while you've got your book or any photos or whatever opened on it. Having any of that open AND not ejecting the drive is probably the easiest way to corrupt the data. But even in the case of corrupted data which we could make sure you just back up again, I would still think the drive itself should be fine and at worst would just need a quick format operation. Unless this was just a really unlucky happening, there's just about 0% chance that the drive itself is broken from pulling it early.



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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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