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Hello All,

I have a Toshiba 64GB USB drive formatted as Fat32 that's full of picture and video files.
The data was copied to it from a Mac, when first plugging it in it mounted ok but none of the video or image files were visible/readable even though Thunar showed the drive was full.

So I opened Gparted, unmounted it, started a Check but after a few seconds Gparted crashes out & closes.
It wouldn't mount again after that & any further attempts with Gparted resulted in the same crash, so I tried 'sudo fsck' through the terminal but that wouldn't work, kept saying the media was mounted when it wasn't.
I ended up plugging it into a Vista machine and using chkdsk on it & managed to get it so it would mount again.

Lol, now I have a USB full of files named 'FSCK0819.REC' etc., all the image files are ok, just the extension had to be changed back to .jpg, some of the video files the same, work fine after an extension change but most of the video files are listed as unknown and won't play after an extension change even though the sizes of the files seem to be about correct.
It appears the crash with Gparted has caused it somehow, Avidemux won't open them, VLC won't play them even though it appears to open them, nothing happens.
Gparted still crashes out if I try doing a check again on this USB drive.

Can this be easily fixed so these videos are usable again?
Or is it not worth the effort?
From what I've been reading it sounds like it's not worth the effort or possibly they can't be recovered anyway but I don't understand much about this sort of issue.

Thanks.

Hi JmaCWQ

Can you just re-copy the damaged files from the Mac again?


At the command line type the command file followed by the filename of the file you want to check. Like this

Example,

Please post the results of one of the damaged files, thanks.

G'day Scott,
Thanks for replying.

No I don't have access to the Mac anymore, it's my Brother's machine & he has it with him over 1000 k's away by now I'd guess, all his holiday videos & pics he left here on his way through a few days ago.
He put stuff on 3 other drives also and they all work fine, a TDK 8GB, + 2 Verbatim 4GB's.
Just the Toshiba 64GB that won't play nice with everything.

I get this from terminal on one of the files

Is that what you wanted?
It won't play in VLC but the size matches one of the originals he put on the drive for me, 490.1 MB it is.
Scott is my Brother's name in case you're wondering why there's a Scott in the file path

Cheers

Hi JmaCWQ

I don't have an answer but here's what I'm thinking...

I was hoping that the file command would at least be able to see the file for a multimedia type but it just sees it as data. I honestly don't know if that means the file is more damaged or not. Do you know what type of multimedia file it was - avi, mpeg, etc.? Maybe Google things like "linux fix mpeg file" and that will give you some ideas. When I Google that phrase I see things like:
[ubuntu] How to repair mpg files? - Ubuntu Forums
Repair mpeg files using ffmpeg - Stack Overflow

Cheers
Scott

Hey Scott,

They are .mp4, .avi, .mkv & a few quicktime files mixed in, lol, well that's what they're supposed to be anyway.
I've had a go with ffmpeg & it didn't seem to like them either, never tried them all but a dozen or so with no luck.
I might try Photorec over the next couple of days, I've had success with it in the past on Ubuntu.

I tried quite a few of the other files with that command in Terminal & they all just showed the same as the results I posted here, data.
I'll let you know how I get on with Photorec or if I stumble across another solution in the meantime.
If not I'll just wipe the lot and post the USB to my brother & ask him to fill it up again.

Thanks again for your reply,

Cheers

I used the Dropbox shared folder feature once to solve a similar problem.

Using this feature I first shared a folder with my sister, did a text file test between the two of us, and then dumped over a gig of data in it. Sure, we were on a pretty fast cable connection but it still worked like a champ.

It's looking like they are faulty USB's, just found out my Mum got 2 of them from flea-bay at what I thought sounded like a deal that was too good to be true.
I got the unused one, formatted it, copied about 5 GB of mp3's to it, looked inside and they appeared ok, played a couple from the drive ok, unmounted then remounted and most of them can't be found even though it shows the space is used on the drive.
LOL, it shows files located outside the folders in it's root directory where they should not be, the folder structure appears different etc., the files won't play and so on...
Tried formatting as NTFS & exfat, on a Vista machine & then as Fat32 on LL2, same result.

Running one through H2testw now and it's time remaining seems to vary from about 15 minutes to over 4 hours, according to the readme that comes with it thats a sign it's defective.
Will see what the final report has to say...

Cheers

Here's the H2testw results from the first USB, took about 3 & a half hours for it to complete.

The media is likely to be defective.
6.8 GByte OK (14430904 sectors)
55.6 GByte DATA LOST (116606280 sectors)
Details:4 KByte overwritten (8 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
55.6 GByte corrupted (116606272 sectors)
4 KByte aliased memory (8 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x00000001b8657000
Expected: 0x00000001b8657000
Found: 0x00000001ba966000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 16.2 MByte/s
Reading speed: 6.80 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

;D

I"ll post the results of the one that had the videos on it once it's finished being tested, I'm guessing the results will be similar.

Thanks for the help Scott

Cheers

JmaCWQ,

I've been watching this thread from the sidelines curiously waiting to see what problem might have been.  At this point, since it appears you have nothing to lose by experimenting, I'm wondering if you might try something else just out of curiosity?

You may have already done this and just not stated it, but if you haven't -- take one of those USBs and use GParted to make a new partition table before trying to reformat it.

*  Open GParted, select USB stick and click Device -> Create Partition Table -> msdos -> Apply.  (Make sure you have the USB selected and not your hard drive.)

*  Make one large FAT32 partition on it.

*  Run another experiment transferring some mp3's, etc. and see if the same problems occur.

This is just a long-shot, wild guess at a potential cause of the problem.
Sometimes brand new USBs come with some kind of built-in software pre-loaded on it.  What purpose it serves I don't know?  But, if it exists it likely does not work in Linux and might be causing the problem.  Wiping out the partition table and creating a new one will get rid of that pre-loaded stuff (and everything else on the USB) that might otherwise remain (hidden) if you just reformat the existing partition(s), or if you just delete and re-create partitions.  Again, this is just a wild guess -- but who knows?  Worth a shot at this point.

P.s.  To mark a thread as "SOLVED", modify the title of the very first post in the thread.  You'll notice that if you go to main page for Hard Drives and SSD's, your post does not say "Solved".  It only shows that on the last post you made.  If you change the title of the first post in the thread, it will show up on the main page listing.

Edited as Solved.