Do NOT backup to an USB-Stick

That sounds really odd. You might be unlucky, heh. I save everything to my usb stick.

Very odd. There's not really any way the game files can damage a USB stick--they're just files, after all. You don't have a habit of unplugging your flash drives without unmounting them first, do you? As that could definitely do damage.

Works fine for the thumb drives I have used as well; even loaded saved games from them.

I agree with kryo, files never mess up my USB stick, you must not of disconnected it correctly

you might want to consider a spyware/virus scan then make sure you disconnect the device properly. Do you have multiple items hooked up to the usb port? Put enough of them on a single usb port and it could effect data, esp if its all flash cards/ram which are dependent on usb power alone. Might even consider a full scandisk (it takes time) in case your hard drive has errors, which might cause transfer problems.

What kind of usb device is it? Ive seen all kinds of models over the years and some are good, some are not worthy of being paper weights.

I use USB external hard drives, with no issues. Ive used flash ram of all kinds, no data problems. I take that back, i did have one problem with a usb drive, XP was defragging, i left to get dr pepper, came back and the defrag program had some sort of write/read error and i lost 6gb of data. Never did find the fix or problem, but i dont defrag usb drives anymore lol.

I bet you if you moved a bunch of text/image/garbage files from anywhere on your hard drive to the flash stick you would have the same trouble.

I hope ya fix the problem, allways bites to loose data.

These days, USB devices can come pre-loaded with viruses. Ick.

i got one very old 256mb usb stick / mp3 player that used fat - i thought that could be the case considering there were almost 900 files kicking into file system limits.

After the first incident i used it on a rather new 1gb stick (buffalo) wit fat32 and this is the one that seems to be out of order.

The files and folders had all weird looking names and the file info told me they used 110GB !

I always use the safely remove hardware button though the drive is even set up for fast removal (no caching).
The exact error i get trying to format is "Windows was unable to complete the format."

the only thing i have on that usb hub is just my keyboard.

Ehm, so if you files from your NTFS Windows system into your FAT/FAT32 USB file system, you get error?

I have a thumb Drive (USB stick) that can shut down some computers simply by TOUCHING them. No joke.

Aren't standard USB sticks formatted to FAT, rather than FAT32 or NTFS?
FAT can't handly files over 2GB in size i believe. FAT32 can handle up to 4GB and NTFS can handle quite a bit over that. (not 100% sure on max size it can handle, but a lot more than 4GB)
A file larger than 2GB will seriously mess up a FAT disk, it just can't handle it. And i doubt windows will stop you from copying the file over.

If you ziped a file that big, try doing it again, but breaking it up into smaller chunks (there are programs capable of doing that) around CDR size maybe, so about 700MB instead of 1 massive file that breaks the FAT.

First of all thank you for all your suggestions, but i think i can throw that one away.



i could copy them first - but then the reading got weird.
Tried the stick at 2 different PC same problem

the funny thing is in disk management the status is shown as healthy !

this is how it looks like :
http://rapidshare.de/files/38639843/Sins_owned_USB-Stick.JPG.html

cant delete , cant format, can not even repartition it, but my microwave will surely own it

Ya know, i remember some of these flash sticks needing a special driver to transfer data/format etc etc. Just to do one more test, try going into safemode (pressing f8 ten thousand times right after you power on the pc) and see if you can format the stick from that mode.

sometimes these things come preloaded with all kinds of stuff, there may be some sort of ..driver or interface software that messes with things.

if it were a hard drive id just fdisk the thing and make a new section, if nothing else just to clear all the data off the thing. However im not sure you can fdisk a flash card.