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USB thumbdrive becomes unformatted — Parallax Forums

USB thumbdrive becomes unformatted

T ChapT Chap Posts: 4,223
edited 2010-10-08 15:26 in General Discussion
Has anyone ever experienced a drive quitting? I now have two cases of client projects experiencing the drive stopping when using them connected to a Vinculum. In one case, I do not believe the drive was ever removed from being connected to the Vinculum, in another case the drive was removed, plugged into a pc and the client listened to the mp3s that were on the drive, then plugged the drive back in. The drive stopped, then I had him plug the drive back into the pc, it said this disk is not formatted. So he reformatted, reinstalled the mp3s and it worked. Typical sandisk 4 gig drives from Radio Shack. I cannot duplicate the problem on my end.

Comments

  • Spiral_72Spiral_72 Posts: 791
    edited 2010-10-07 10:18
    I've heard rumors of this if you pull the drive without ejecting it on an older computer, pre-2005 computers as a guess. I've never had it happen to me though.
  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2010-10-07 10:24
    If a file was opened, written, then power was removed without closing the file this could happen, but it would be very unlikely.

    A bug in the program could send garbage to the Vinculum drive and cause it to write garbage to the drive.
  • RobotWorkshopRobotWorkshop Posts: 2,307
    edited 2010-10-08 13:44
    You may have just run into a couple bad Thumbdrives. A friend of mine at work had a couple of the cheap generic ones go out and I had one go bad myself. When I took one apart and pulled up the specs on the chips used it was obvious it wasn't going to last long. Some brands are better than others.

    - Is this an application that writes to the USB drive a lot?

    - Have they tried a different brand of USB Thumbdrive?

    - As someone mentioned there could be a bug in the code that wrote garbage to the drive and trashed the data.

    - How is the project powered? Is it running on batteries or on utility power that may be subject to outages?

    Robert
  • sam_sam_samsam_sam_sam Posts: 2,286
    edited 2010-10-08 15:06
    I have had the same thing happen and I found that you MUST eject the drive before you remove for this not to happen:)
  • T ChapT Chap Posts: 4,223
    edited 2010-10-08 15:26
    Thanks for the ideas.

    The drives only serve to play back mp3's, there is no "open file" process going on in the code that would require closing, mp3's are just a simple instruction to play the file. There is not writing to the drives. Basically the same as a VMusic2. I cannot find mention in the Vinculum manual a command for formatting a disk, but it could still exist.
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