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Flash drive down 
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:46 pm
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For the past five years, I've used a flash drive to run portable Firefox as well as save a few files. The whole thing is encrypted using TrueCrypt.

Normally I'd run TrueCrypt, mount the drive and can access my folders and firefox. For some reason today, firefox hung. I had to reboot the computer twice and now I can't access anything. If I mount the drive as normal, it shows up but then tells me it's not accessible and the file or directory is corrupted.

I'm not overly bothered since I can always start afresh and anything valuable is stored in the cloud but is there any way to regain access?

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Fri May 25, 2018 11:28 am
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:25 pm
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Do you just read from the drive?

Flash drives lose their charge over time if they aren't re-written. That means that cells that are written a long time ago will gradually lose their state and be unreadable at some point.

Try using Spinrite on it, a quick level 2 scan is often enough to cause the drive to re-read the sectors and either re-write or move the data.

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Wed May 30, 2018 8:50 am
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Thanks big_D. I tend to use firefox portable on it so I'd imagine it does read/write to the flash drive but probably not to the whole thing.

I used testdisk to access the drive and managed to read most of the files, though some were still corrupt. Still, the drive has lasted at least five years for firefox portable, and a few years before that as a standard portable drive.

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Thu May 31, 2018 7:44 am
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