Arch Linux

FUBAR

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2004-12-08

Posts: 1,029

Website

[ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

It's been a pretty awful week so far, and this morning things got even worse. And I'm not even talking about a misterious rash: I'm at home, far away from my computers running decent OS'es. I booted my moms laptop running WinXP and wanted to access my USB-stick: it holds all the programs I use regularly.

I got an amusing dialog saying "Disk isn't formatted. Want me to format it right now?"
Needless to say I'm pretty stumped: I did a clean shut down yesterday. I left the stick in the USB-drive, while I did it, but so what.
This is the second time it's happened to me, and both times it happened while I was using Windows XP. I don't think this is a coincidence.
I can probably fix things by simply formatting it, but still: it's an inconvenience.

Does anyone know a little about this? Or has anyone noticed the same?

PS: This was mostly a rant, had to get it off my chest. Feel free to bash Windows in this thread, it'll make me feel better.

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A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation.

Danny

Member

From: Croatia

Registered: 2005-06-05

Posts: 64

Website

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

Gah.. windows. It decided to 'fix' my E: by deleting all the data on it yesterday (or was it the day before? duh i lost track of time). Luckily I've made a backup just a few days ago.

BURN WINDOWS! :evil:  :evil:  :evil:

About your stick.. I havent got that yet. I've got a mp3 player though, but it acts like a stick.. just drag n drop files on it. I had it many times with my old floppies though. :x

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I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.

Kern

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2005-02-09

Posts: 464

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

i got the same "disk isnt formatted" - for some reason the usbstick  makers also split the mem so its like a 1.44 floppy and a big drive on the same stick.

IIRC if you format it in Windows as a FAT type, Linux and Win will both be happy. not so the other way round. this may be a Windows "feature" like when a certain 3.1x wouldnt see any DOS apart from M$ Dos.

if its any consolation, the data should still be on there.
if its urgent you get stuff back, maybe use the windows rawrite util and copy an image to the hard drive and export it back to some other media.

There are other options too, let me know if you're stuck.

arch_mike

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2005-06-25

Posts: 29

Website

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

If its NTFS on the usb-stick , than i have encountered the same issue , but i just thought it was windows not liking that another filesystem was able to access it and change premissions ( use mine for a bootloader now )
but i never use windows anymore so i never found a solution

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<Insert>

scarecrow

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2004-11-18

Posts: 715

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

No problems here with a Samsung 512M USB stick, vfat formatted. It works fine, even under my XP Vmware machine (although for safety I always do a "sudo rmmod usb_storage" before plugging it and let the VM automount it).
I also have a large 200G HD in USB case, single partition, NTFS 5.1 formatted, which no matter how much I've tried toying with udev rules, Arch thinks it's reiserfs... my solution for mounting it was making a script which unmounts the volume, changes the fstab-sync entry appropriately and remounts the volume as NTFS with nls=utf8. Surely enough there is an easier solution by toying around hal and ivman settings, but I can live with my crude solution as well. The XP virtual machine mounts it fine after unloading the usb_storage module, but this is not much of a surprise, even for WinXP...

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Microshaft delenda est

FUBAR

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2004-12-08

Posts: 1,029

Website

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

The stick used to work fine! I was running programs off it yesterday! But this morning, it was unreadable. I blame Windows: I bet it screwed up the partition table when I turned off the computer.

The data on it isn't critical, just a few hours of work to get everything back on. Oh well.

Even funnier: when I want to format the stick, Windows says it can't. I have to find a Win98 computer now, Windows 98 doesn't complain and just formats the sucker.

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A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation.

deficite

Member

From: Augusta, GA

Registered: 2005-06-02

Posts: 693

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

I've had problems with my Lexar 256MB stick on XP. It would sometimes say it wasn't formatted and then if I try to format it like it says to it sits there for about 3 or 4 minutes before telling me it can't format it. I can try to format it over and over and it'll tell me the same thing. Surprisingly, XP's computer management's partition thing can format it just fine. I usually do that or just go over to my real computer with Arch on it and format it from there. Imagine that, Linux can format Windows file systems better than Windows.

I really wish Windows would understand ext3 so I didn't have to use FAT32 on my flash drive. Explore2fs only has read access and I'm too lazy to find anything else.

cactus

Taco Eater

From: t͈̫̹ͨa͖͕͎̱͈ͨ͆ć̥̖̝o̫̫̼s͈̭̱̞͍̃!̰

Registered: 2004-05-25

Posts: 4,622

Website

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

Winxp screwing your usb drive..
that windows..it will sleep with anything.. no wonder it has so many viruses.

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"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos" -- Cactus' Law
"t̥͍͎̪̪͗a̴̻̩͈͚ͨc̠o̩̙͈ͫͅs͙͎̙͊ ͔͇̫̜t͎̳̀a̜̞̗ͩc̗͍͚o̲̯̿s̖̣̤̙͌ ̖̜̈ț̰̫͓ạ̪͖̳c̲͎͕̰̯̃̈o͉ͅs̪ͪ ̜̻̖̜͕" -- -̖͚̫̙̓-̺̠͇ͤ̃ ̜̪̜ͯZ͔̗̭̞ͪA̝͈̙͖̩L͉̠̺͓G̙̞̦͖O̳̗͍

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

The stick used to work fine! I was running programs off it yesterday! But this morning, it was unreadable. I blame Windows: I bet it screwed up the partition table when I turned off the computer.

The data on it isn't critical, just a few hours of work to get everything back on. Oh well.

Even funnier: when I want to format the stick, Windows says it can't. I have to find a Win98 computer now, Windows 98 doesn't complain and just formats the sucker.

Format it in linux, just: mkfs.vfat /dev/sdXX

mezoko

Member

Registered: 2005-03-26

Posts: 310

Website

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

format the drivei n windows

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"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: [ Rant ] WinXP screwed up my USB-stick again.

Winxp screwing your usb drive..
that windows..it will sleep with anything.. no wonder it has so many viruses.

:oops: i feel violated every single time i boot into windows!