Can't get files out of my thumb drive

Posted by ___Scythe@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 9 comments

I recently reset my pc, and I moved all the files I wanted to keep onto a thumb drive and I had no issues. Now that I'm trying to copy them from the drive onto my pc, it's going at 350kbps or just stops and doesn't transfer at all, it is somewhat of a cheap USB drive, but is there anyway to get those files out? it's a 300gb zip file btw.

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Valuable_Fly8362@reddit

In a fake USB drive, declared space does not match physical space. Fake drives will let you write files bigger than their physical capacity without raising any errors. The file will look fine until you try to read or copy it. At that point, the data will be incomplete, corrupted, or both.

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MikhailPelshikov@reddit

Keep at it. There is a chance it's just a slow drive.

For the future: verify the data was copied correctly.

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BrewingHeavyWeather@reddit

Assuming the drive is legit (got a brand and model, by any chance?), I would start with ddrescue, to an image on a known good larger drive (with a log, for restarting). That involves running a live Linux distro, and may be a deep rabbit hole to start going down.

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AstarothSquirrel@reddit

The first thing that springs to mind is - is this possibly one of the cheap fraud flash drives that are marketed at 1-2tb but are in fact 16-32gb? If so, chances are your data is more corrupt than a certain political figure.

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evolveandprosper@reddit

A 300GB zip file would require a 512GB flash drive to hold it. If it is a "cheap" 512GB USB drive then it is almost certainly a fake. Proper 512GB USB drives are not "cheap". Unfortunately, there are a LOT of fake high-capacity USB drives around. These are USB drives of much smaller capacity than their claimed size but where the onboard firmware has been hacked to make them look like they have much higher capacity. Some of these fake drives will look like they are having large amounts of data tansferred but they are actually just repeatedly overwriting the previous data they have just received. I'm afraid that there is a very high probability that your data is unretrievable.

In the unlikely event that your USB drive is genuine, you need to expect a transfer time of several hours (possibly many hours) to transfer 300GB over USB.

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simagus@reddit

If you are trying to unzip the files from the drive, try moving the entire .zip file to your PC instead then unzip it there.

Try a different USB port and try to have as little happening on the PC as possible, but other than that you could have a corrupt .zip file or potentially a bad drive.

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