From: John Ruschmeyer (jruschme_at_comcast.net)
Date: Tue Mar 30 2004 - 12:40:37 PST
> From: Marco Mailand
> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 2:11 PM
> To: NTLK
> Subject: Re: [NTLK] OT: USB Pen Drives
>
> "John Ruschmeyer" wrote @ 28.3.2004 23:54 Uhr / <jruschme_at_comcast.net>:
> > On a whim, I plugged it in and copied about a 100mb to it. This time,
> > though, I left it plugged into the computer for 36 hours. Since then,
> > I've plugged it a couple of times to briefly check for corruption. So
> > far, though, there has been no corruption in over 24 hours.
> I would say that Windoofs is fooling all of us. It doesn't show the copy
> progress bar at all if a copy process is shorter than a few
> seconds. And at
> longer copy processes it makes the progress bar disappearing earlier then
> appropriate and continues to copy data to the stick or memory card in the
> background or doing some sort of write success checking or
> whatever. You'll
> have to wait until the USB device eject function gives the message "this
> card can be ejected now safely" or similar. The whole USB plugging and
> especially unplugging technique is highly flaky under windoofs
> and the MacOS
> is only a little bit better, IMHO and based on my so far bad experiences.
The more I play with this, the more I tend to agree.
I've gotten to the point where I can reliably write to the drive using
Linux. (Stopped using mtools, now I do a mount/umount and throw in a sync to
be certain.)
OTOH, I moved the drive to my laptop running Win2K and copied a couple of
files to it. I swear that I waited until the light stopped blinking and did
an "Unplug or Eject Hardware" and waited for the "safe" message and it
*still* managed to corrupt one of the two FATs.
I've checked Device Manager and the option to enable Write Caching for the
drive is both unchecked and greyed out. Based on that, I'd *think* that
write-behind caching wasn't enabled. Even so, I'd have thought that choosing
the eject option would have flushed the buffers.
Oddly, this is the only pendrive I have which exhibits this problem. Neither
my ancient 16mb drive or my newer 64mb one (actually an SD card in a Lexar
JumpDrive Trio) have this issue. I almost wonder if it is some quirk of the
formatting of this drive (I was almost tempted to try reformatting it with a
single FAT to see if that made a difference).
Frustrated...
<<<john>>>
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