USB Flash Memory Sticks - Problems
 

I picked up one of these little gems a few months ago. It came with drivers for Win98, and Win2K has the drivers built in. I was intending to use it for transporting data, downloads, etc. from the Win2K machine at work to my home machine, and vice versa.

I've been having a devil of a time getting one machine to read stuff that was put there by the other machine. One of the techs told me that Win2K doesn't handle FAT32 well (!!!), or there may be formatting differences, be careful how you eject (can't just pull it out, it seems), etc.

Anyone else haveing problems with these things? I've even found that stuff loaded on one machine at work may not be readable by another machine, same OS. Both are USB 2.0, I'm 1.1 at home.

Any suggestions appreciated.

I've had problems when pulling them out of the USB connection before stopping the device. I think if you do that -- remove before stopping -- the OS may be in the process of rewriting parts of the indices or allocation tables (or whatever) and you run the risk of corrupting your data. It happened three times to me, all three happened right after I removed without stopping.

They need to make these things with a push-button on the stick, that when pushed, triggers an event that stops the device on the OS.

P.S: W2K not handling FAT32 is nonsense.

There's also every chance that there's a problem with the memory stick itself or with the USB port on your home system. Try:

-Re-installing the Windows 98 drivers
-Different USB ports on both your home and work systems (if available)
-Re-formatting the memory stick (part of the storage may be corrupted in a manner that one OS handles differently to the other)
-Always stop the memory stick before removing
-If all else fails, try a different memory stick (they're dirt cheap at the moment).

I did find problems just pulling the device out before stopping it - only 5-10% of the time, but I'm now in the habit of stopping it. I have 98, 2000, and XP machines and haven't had problems with multiple sticks in a while.

If you are using XP
 

Two ways to handle this problem:

1. Always do an "eject hardware" before removing the memory stick. The problem is that by default, XP will not always do an immediate write to the drive so if you remove it before the actual write, the data will not get written.

2. When you install the memory stick, go to control panel, settings, then select your memory stick and go to the "policies" tab. You will see a radio button for "optimize for performance" and one for "optimize for quick removal". If you check the "optimize for quick removal", then step number 1 above will not be necessary as XP will do an immediate write when you store the data.