oh no ...my WD usb external drive is messing up my movie files...

...I have some VERY gay porn (well one that I know of) starting off
with all male action and ending with a part episode of The Forsyte
Sage. How the **** does that happen? I notice some of TFS files have a
zero file size and at least one of them has competely replaced another
movie on the drive. Now I'm worried that some of my mainstream movies
have become infected with snippets of gay porn - dare I lend the
neighbour anything to watch. Am I doing something which might be
causing this to happen?

pystol

pystol wrote:
> ..I have some VERY gay porn (well one that I know of) starting off
> with all male action and ending with a part episode of The Forsyte
> Sage. How the **** does that happen? I notice some of TFS files have a
> zero file size and at least one of them has competely replaced another
> movie on the drive. Now I'm worried that some of my mainstream movies
> have become infected with snippets of gay porn - dare I lend the
> neighbour anything to watch. Am I doing something which might be
> causing this to happen?

Last time I saw that was when a drive was formatted fat and uncleanly
disconnected after copying stuff to it. Made a right mess of lots on it.

But noone uses fat32 these days so I doubt its that. Hell, drives dont
even come formatted with it.

Richard

On Nov 3, 11:21*pm, Richard <r...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> pystol wrote:
> > ..I have some VERY gay porn (well one that I know of) starting off
> > with all male action and ending with a part episode of The Forsyte
> > Sage. How the **** does that happen? I notice some of TFS files have a
> > zero file size and at least one of them has competely replaced another
> > movie on the drive. Now I'm worried that some of my mainstream movies
> > have become infected with snippets of gay porn - dare I lend the
> > neighbour anything to watch. Am I doing something which might be
> > causing this to happen?
>
> Last time I saw that was when a drive was formatted fat and uncleanly
> disconnected after copying stuff to it. Made a right mess of lots on it.
>

There is a chain of pointers to each 'cluster' (1 - 8 k or so) in the
fat table and the table is updated after writing a file. If the drive
is unplugged before that operation is complete you can end up with a
corrupted fat table which may be pointing to clusters carrying
irrevelant information.

You should always go through the proper protocol when unplugging a
memory stick, external hard drive, etc. Or at the very least pause for
several seconds after a likely write operation has finished to allow
any 'finishing up' operations to occur.

There is another thing to be careful of. Terminate programs properly.
Do not switch off the computer while they are running or 'crash' out
of them (eg using ctrl-c or ctl-alt-del and killing). Some programs
write to output but do not 'close' the output stream until it is ended
in the normal way. If ended abnormally, some data may still be in
memory buffer and not written to the HD, stick, etc and will be lost
as well as possibly leaving a mashed up file system.

peterwn