98 Guy,

A few things can go screwy with drive volumes, descriptor
tables, MBR, etc.

True. But those would cause rather obvious problems, like getting garbage
back when browsing the stick. And as that does not seem to happen ...

One thing that gets messed up is the tally of free space.

Agreed. But its also nothing that will cause a problem (and thus *most*
be repaired) if you leave it as it is (should get re-calculated / gets
messed-up the next time you add or delete something anyway).

Let win-7 fix it.

Nope. I have *no* idea what Win7 thinks "fixing" means, and it refuses to
inform me. For all I know it could muck-up the stick so bad that it won't
function properly anymore, or not properly under Win98se.

Hmmm... Now I think of it, after the last time the stick caused trouble on
my W98se machine I thought it better to reformat it (had to do a few
scandisks and repairs on the stick). And yes, I did that on the XP machine.
:-)

And by the way, this night I had my W98se machine copy a series of files to
the reformatted, empty stick, using USB 1.1 . It was able to copy over 3500
files and folders before the machine froze hard -- nice sight, a fully black
screen with only the mousepointer visible on it. (a quick shows a few
randomly-selected files to be alright).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:
98 Guy schreef in berichtnieuws ...
"R.Wieser" wrote:

plug the stick into the win-7 machine and see if you get any
messages like "the drive is messed up" or need to be repaired

Not an idea I will follow easily. I've got a small (2GB) stick here
which has _served me for years without a problem_, but a friends Win7
machine always wants to "repair" it. It does not think its in any
way necessary to tell us _what_ is wrong, so I always decline.

A few things can go screwy with drive volumes, descriptor tables, MBR,
etc.

One thing that gets messed up is the tally of free space.

It wouldn't hurt to format the drive once in a while. Thumb drives have
limited number of write-cycles (the flash ram cells can burn out).
Formatting might tell you that the drive has some "bad sectors".

Let win-7 fix it. Take a copy of all the important stuff on it first if
you must.