Windows XP strange

[terryco]

A friend of mine has xp and a 16 gb flashdrive. He put some mp3 music albums on the flashdrive, and drive was showing gb's of taken space but all files were empty. I have tried puting the albums on the drive with Vista and the albums showed up untill i took the drive out and upon replacing it they also showed as empty, although the drive states gb's are on there. I hope my post makes sense to someone and perhaps a simple solution can be found. When files are opened there is nothing there. Any help would be most appreciated. Other files pictures ect are ok.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Format the drive in NTFS.

Transfer one song to it and see if it transfers without error (play the music from the flash drive to confirm).

Then try transferring a few albums.

If there are errors, suspect a faulty flashdrive.

 

[Madxgraphics]

As Floops says, formatthe drive to NTFS. When you are adding MP3's to the drive are you just sopying them and pasting them ? If you are doing it this way, yes then when you remove the drive from the machine thy will show up as empty files.

 

[terryco]

Thank you for the replys. I have tried to reformat the drive and get "Windows cannot format drive K:\ check to see that the disc and drive are connected properly, make sure that the disc is not read only and then try again for more information search help for read only files and how to change them". I am not sure where to look for this help. I am doing this on Vista, although the drive will be used on XP. Should i format it on a pc with XP os

 

[muckshifter]

Should i format it on a PC with XP OS

Nothing to loose, except the data.

Vista automatically sets a USB drive, if capable, to "optimize for Quick Removal" and that restricts the drive to FAT32 ... you could change this to "Optimize for Performance" which should, if capable, allow the drive to be formatted to NTFS.

If you do this, then you absolutely must go through the annoying removal dialog "safely remove hardware" before unplugging the drive. If you don't, then you have a good chance of losing data.

The reason to use NTFS is to avoid the fact that you cannot store files larger than 4GB due to the FAT32 format.

 

[terryco]

I think i'll give it back to him and let him sort it out. I have just tried formatting on a xp pc and could only format in fat 32.