Formatting memory sticks...

[Justloadit]

Adrian, you may not have set the "View Hidden Files" option in W7, and you may have this option enabled on XP.
For W7 - go to control panel, and select Folder Options, then tick the box - Show all files

[adrianh]

eish...

[tec0]

Tell me if this sounds in any way familiar, I followed what you said Adrian. Tell me did you use the drive in a device "something other than a computer" Example DVD player or perhaps a MP3 player in your car something like that?

It sounds to me that your drive might be "ghosting" this happen when your older devices "mp3 players in cars especially" cash the file on the actual drive because it has virtually no storage memory. Now there is a second reason why flash drives shows "ghost" files it can be that your actual buffer or storage memory had its day.

Now if it is corrupted clusters chances are your software will work around them isolate them and allow you to use the drive a while longer.

But be you didn't put the hidden file on the drive then it is ghosting beyond anything I have ever come across. I know I did try and run a OS from a 32Gb memory drive and noticed a partition space of about 250MB that was occupied with windows "system files" but again I don't think you did that so really you got me stumped.

My best guess is the ghosting scenario.

[adrianh]

tec0 - eish....

[twinscythe12332]

Hi adrianh,
How old is this bugger? if it's relatively new (ie under any form of warranty), I'd say take it back to the place you bought it and ask for a refund. Why go through all the hassle of trying to get it working if it isn't playing by the rules?
Sounds like a corruption of the table or a hardware fault. I had a mate's 1 TB HDD turn into a 50mb disk one time because of something similar. Fortunately, he could return it.

[adrianh]

I've spent more time on the issue and it seems that there are a whole host of things happening simultaneously.

Just as a matter of interest, it is a 8GB stick with no data of any real value. If it works or doesn't work is not really important because I have various other sticks lying around. I am just really interested in the behaviour of the stick and why I get such different results on W7 & XP

Lets separate issues:
The stick got messed up due to the format...I think. I will see if I can work through the tools on that Russian site to see whether it will come alive again.
---
I am looking at another stick with the same hidden file problem:

Yes, you guys are right, the reason I couldn't see the files was because Explorer did not show hidden or system files for the stick. I find this rather odd because I see those files on all my other drives. I want to know why those files are hidden, nobody would ever hide them and I seem to have all sorts of files hidden on a couple of the sticks.

Ok, so, on W7 I see hidden files and there is a curious file sitting in the root called asnzlvvpmp.vbe. I try to rename the file. T.txt nd the machine gets very upset. It claims that the file is owned by "everyone" and that I do not have permission to rename it. I also cannot copy it, delete it or anything.

So, I now put the same stick into the XP machine and I see all the files. I rename asnzlvvpmp.vbe to ttt.txt and the machine is happy to do so. I now open ttt.txt and find crudely encrypted instruction within the file. The program is a long string of decimal values separated by the pipe sign. There is a routine later on that creates a new string by converting the decimal values to their ASCII equivalents and also strips off the pipe signs. The last instruction is then to execute the code.

I will write a routine this evening to work out what the code actually does.

My concern is that the W7 machines react rather violently to me trying to fiddle with the fie and XP doesn't seem to care about the file at all. I do have anti virus etc. but it seems to me as if that file is being protected in some way.

Now here is a thought, lets say that the file is part of a virus. It may be possible that when the file is written to the stick all the files and directories become inadvertently hidden when the virus tries to hide that file. It makes sense because the files and directories that are hidden are not significant in any way, some drawing, music, jpgs and other odds and ends.

I think that there is a much larger serious issue lurking under the hood of my W7 machines and I am hell bent on finding out exactly what it is.

[Chrisjan B]

Eish, you are now on the right track - I now recall something called super hidden....

That happened many moons ago.....

[adrianh]

I'm working my way through deciphering the VB code...Clever buggers

[adrianh]

Nah, that code is way too cleverly encrypted. Ok, I think that there is a vrot virus on one of the machines that seriously messes with our memory sticks.

[AndyD]

Are you set up as a true administrator on your Win7 PC? Not just administrator..there's a difference. Check out the security issues first though.