Netbook eats my documents

November 19, 2008 10:20 AM

What the heck did my Asus EEE do to my documents?

So, I was working on a paper, saving changes every 2 minutes, and then I copied a large file onto my usb drive. I removed the drive, put the drive back in, and tried to bring up my paper. Everything was gone except for the large file!

I then realized I had to delete the usb from the file manager and put it back in. But once I had done that, it had old versions of the files on there. Is there anyway I can recover the changes I'd made and saved?

Where did the saved changes go? to the realm of nowhere?

posted by superbird to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Did you safely unmount the USB disk, or did you just pull it out of the computer?

Because the former is dangerous: Small writes to USB drives are often buffered, and only actually written when you unmount (or 'eject') the disk.

The large file may have been copied directly because it's larger than the buffer.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:57 AM on November 19, 2008

There's a slim chance of corruption when pulling out USB drives. Especially after large transfers. It could also be the case that when you pulled the drive out the large transfer was not finished. Or it just may be dying. You may have corrupted the drive too. Its impossible to know.

You can run a disk check on it by right-clicking the drive in My Computer and selecting properties > tools > error checking Check Now (click the two little boxes for both options). That'll fix the drive if it has errors, but chances are your file is gone and there's a good chance that the drive might be dying.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:58 AM on November 19, 2008

Did you safely unmount the USB disk, or did you just pull it out of the computer?

This is my suspicion. I've bricked two SD cards this way. If you didn't unmount superbird, you're lucky the USB stick still works at all.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 11:26 AM on November 19, 2008

Was this Windows or Linux? (Windows is sometimes a "little" more tolerant of simply grabbing a thumbdrive and yanking it out) (Yes my EEE runs Windows XP)

Was it Microsoft Word or something else (OpenOffice, etc.)?

Some links if it was Microsoft Word:
- Autorecovery (2007)
posted by jkaczor at 12:30 PM on November 19, 2008