Flash Drive: Strange Thing Has Happened

[Tom Saurus]

I put a folder of captured YouTube FLV files on my Thumb Drive. I was using our Blu-Ray Player to play them. I put them through the Video To Video Converter and used the Direct Stream Copy mode and changed the extension to .mp4 so that I could fast forward and rewind if I so chose as the .flv files don't do that on our LG Blu-Ray player. Last night everything seemed to be working fine. At some point today something went wrong. I went to the folder using the Blu-Ray player and only 4 out of the 39 files showed up now. So I checked the folder out on my computer and discovered that most of the files have weird symbols and such as their names now and the files are showing up as 0 bytes and that they are system files. I can't delete the whole folder. I can try to delete the individual files but it tells me they are Windows System Files and that Windows might not work anymore if I do so. The files are in a folder on the Flash Drive, can I try to delete them individual and not worry. What should I do? I won't change the file extensions in the future like I have it leads to this type of problem. I will convert them to the .mp4 format if it will avoid the problem.

I have other files on the drive and they are playing just fine. Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me. I am quite certain I am not dealing with a virus.

[Baldrick]

I doubt it has anything to do with the video remuxing to mp4.

Maybe is the drive dying? Tried run some chkdsk or similar.

[Tom Saurus]

Baldrick: Following your advice I ran an "Error Checking" and Windows seemed to fix the problem. Now all that is left of the problem folder is a single file that is 32.0 KB in size. I am hoping I will be able to delete that with no problem. It says in the properties of the file Attributes: N. This thumb drive was recently bought about a month ago. It is a Kingston 32 GB drive. All the other files other than that folder seem to be working fine. Thank you for your advice. I better not put my only copy of a file or folder on this drive to be safe. Do you think it would be safe to delete the little file referencing the bad folder? Thanks in advance once again for any advice on this issue.

[Tom Saurus]

I did another error check of the Flash Drive and this time no problems were located.

[jimdagys]

Same thing happened to me. I would take off any usable files, reformat the drive and then put back on what you want. I would say it was static electricity. Use static electricity precautions. I've never had a problem with my flash drive since.

[Tom Saurus]

jimdagys: I followed your advice. I moved the files off the thumb drive and I have formatted it to NTSF. I am transferring some files to it to test it out. Thank you for your advice.

[Tom Saurus]

The drive was working fine for a couple weeks and this morning it tells me to format and on top of that the Blu-Ray player can't access it. I think I bought a failing drive. Thankfully I had other copies of everything on that thumb drive.