Hey guys,

I have a 2GB usb drive, when I plug it in and click open folder to view files, it looks like this



However, i recently put a bunch of files on it, and KNOW that its full. I can confirm this by right clicking on it in 'my computer' and selecting properties



Any ideas on why this is happening / how I can fix it / if the files I put on the drive will ever be accessible?

I have already attempted defragmenting the usb drive, and checking it for errors. Neither of these things seemed to help

Thanks

The files are likely in the recycle bin of the drive and/or hidden. Simply formatting the drive should do the trick...

Isn't OP trying to access the files? If so, surely formatting might endanger them?

The files are probably hidden or system files.

From there, tap and release "Alt" to activate the menu. Choose Tools -> Folder Options, and then select the "View" tab.

Click the radio button next to "Show Hidden Files and Folders" and make sure that "Hide protected operating system files" is unchecked. Then APPLY and OK.

Now if there are any files at all, hidden, system, or not, on the drive, you will see them.

CAUTION: Don't do this to your C: drive unless you know what you're doing. If you accidentally delete certain system or hidden files, you're FAQ'd.

Jester

Thanks for your helpful replies guys.

Jester, I did exactly w hat you said, however the files are renamed and broken into really small '.chk' files

Does this mean I wont be able to use/recover them as MP3/jpg/text files?

.CHK files are file fragments that were "recovered" by CHKDSK, after Windows determined that the files were likely corrupt.

While it can be done by someone that *really* knows what they are doing, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone other than a data recovery expert would be able to reassemble the constituent .CHK files into uncorrupted image or MP3 files.

I hope you have a good backup of those files elsewhere.

It is *possible* that if the file sizes are correct that some of the .CHK files might be complete images or MP3s that just need to be renamed. You can try this to see if it works. (If they were MP3s, you might want to use an MP3 tag studio software to rename any files based upon their embedded MP3 tag, rather than trial by error).

Note that this corruption was PROBABLY caused one of two ways:

1) These are not, in fact, the remnants of the MP3 and images, but are files placed on the flash drive from corrupt files on your C: drive, after you told Vista to use the flash drive for SpeedBoost (at which time it might have erased the original files. I consider this pretty unlikely, given that a SpeedBoost flash drive doesn't store data in that format.

2) You did not use the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray before unplugging the drive, and you unplugged it at *just* the wrong moment, while the directory structure was being rewritten. If the directory structure got blown away, then all of the files in it were "allocation errors", sectors allocated on the disk without a corresponding entry in the directory structure... and were thus recovered as CHK files. If this is so (and it's the most likely cause here), then any files that were not fragmented may be recoverable as I described above.

Jester

lol sorry about my suggestion i totally misread. I thought u just wanted the free space back as the files were obviously hidden/recycled

Im thinking its this. I was loading more than 2 gb of stuff worth onto it i guess, and then it said 'erorr there is no more space' (obviously those are my own words, not windows) and it gave me the option to abort or retry, and i just took out the drive.

If the stuff is lost, such is life, im going to just format it. Unless there is a very simple and fast way to recover it, its not really worth any huge process to get the stuff back, especially considering that i would be going without my usb drive in the meantime as a result