Problem with flash drive

[roybin]

Hey!

Having a very strange problem with my 4GB Stig Memory Stick ... there's a folder on it that had 2 small pdf files (for college) that now says it's 54.5GB.

Within this folder are other folders and files that my laptop can't read. They have nonsense names on them ... literally random letters and numbers. I've tried deleting the whole file, deleting individual files (within the folder) & formatting the whole drive. It's causing problems with some other files (mainly .avi files) ... sometimes they work, sometimes they don't so can't be totally sure that it's related but call it an educated guess.

Any ideas?? I wouldn't be totally clueless when it comes to computers but i've never seen this before!

Thanks!!

 

[Archean]

Probably some sort of virus/trojan infection, do you have any AntiVirus/Antimalware solution ? if not you can try Avira (free and Malwarebytes.

 

[yangly18]

I'm going to take a stab and say this could also be what happens when your computer either copies the files wrong or you dont safe remove the drive from the computer. I found that with my Tb drive I took up more space on my drive by accident because I didn't safe remove my drive once while it was doing a backup, and it 'hid' the files in the background and took up all that space, but thats just my little story

as archean says, a virus scan would at least tell you if your files were infected, maby it's just corrupted files though, since many time when files get corrupted they turn into random numbers/letters/symbols.

 

[Archean]

Yes it can, roy it would be good idea to run chkdsk /f to go with the earlier advice to see what comes up before those scans.

To do you that you need to go to Start, Run, type CMD in it and type chkdsk x:/f

Make sure you do that with an Administrator Account.

 

[roybin]

Yeah, i'd already scanned it with mcafee which did seem to take forever but came back wth nothing. Will defo run the check disk ... Thanks!!

 

[Archean]

Alright; please keep us posted, goodluck