Longtime SpinRite customer and "Security Now!" listener, but my first post here.
I heard about ValiDrive from Steve's podcast a few weeks ago, and this week was the first time I had a special reason to try it. We use Windows Media Center, and I was offloading a World Series game for storage on a different computer. Halfway through the copy operation, the 128GB flash drive I was using suddenly disappeared from Windows Explorer and the copy operation stopped.
After fruitlessly trying a few things on that computer, I disconnected the flash drive and took it to my office for deeper investigation. Attempts to reformat the drive began normally, but would come to a halt at some point. I started wondering if this might be one of those flash drives with improperly reported capacity, so I downloaded ValiDrive and ran it on the flash drive. Here are three screenshots showing what ValiDrive reported:
Next, I ran a level 2 SpinRite scan on the flash drive. The program was humming along, until it reached the 60.74% point when it slowed down to a crawl, only updating the display after literally several minutes each time. Eventually I gave up, figuring that at the current rate SpinRite would take months to complete. It never did report any bad sectors, all the squares on the Graphic Status Display were white. (I can upload photos of some of the SpinRite screens if needed.)
So finally I put Hard Disk Sentinel to work on the flash drive. Below is what that program reported. The first image was taken at about the moment that HDS visibly slowed down, while the second was taken after it finished:
At this point, I have no expectation that the "missing" capacity on that drive can be reclaimed. But I am curious what could be going on with it. Was the capacity reported wrongly all along, or did something happen to the drive? I'd had the drive for a couple of years but had never previously filled it past the halfway mark.
Any ideas or insights will be greatly appreciated!
I heard about ValiDrive from Steve's podcast a few weeks ago, and this week was the first time I had a special reason to try it. We use Windows Media Center, and I was offloading a World Series game for storage on a different computer. Halfway through the copy operation, the 128GB flash drive I was using suddenly disappeared from Windows Explorer and the copy operation stopped.
After fruitlessly trying a few things on that computer, I disconnected the flash drive and took it to my office for deeper investigation. Attempts to reformat the drive began normally, but would come to a halt at some point. I started wondering if this might be one of those flash drives with improperly reported capacity, so I downloaded ValiDrive and ran it on the flash drive. Here are three screenshots showing what ValiDrive reported:
Next, I ran a level 2 SpinRite scan on the flash drive. The program was humming along, until it reached the 60.74% point when it slowed down to a crawl, only updating the display after literally several minutes each time. Eventually I gave up, figuring that at the current rate SpinRite would take months to complete. It never did report any bad sectors, all the squares on the Graphic Status Display were white. (I can upload photos of some of the SpinRite screens if needed.)
So finally I put Hard Disk Sentinel to work on the flash drive. Below is what that program reported. The first image was taken at about the moment that HDS visibly slowed down, while the second was taken after it finished:
At this point, I have no expectation that the "missing" capacity on that drive can be reclaimed. But I am curious what could be going on with it. Was the capacity reported wrongly all along, or did something happen to the drive? I'd had the drive for a couple of years but had never previously filled it past the halfway mark.
Any ideas or insights will be greatly appreciated!