I work on two computers, one in my office, another at home, both on WinXP. The home computer is offline.
I iuse a Cruzer mini Flash drive 8Gb for transferring the work files between the computers, but the transferred volume is relatively small, so that about 6Gb on the flash drive is free.
Lately I found that some of the files copied onto the flash drive become distorted, and either the contents of a file or the file names are in gibberish and sometimes the computer cannot find or cannot read the file etc.
It happens in both directions – when copying from one or the other computer, so the problem is with the drive itself.
I would like to know if this might be due to some “natural” wear of the flash drive or only of some bug on he drive.
How can I repair, if at all, such a problem? Will formatting of the flash drive help? Is there some life limit (in time, in overall volume handling etc) for a flash drive? How can the integrity of the drive be checked?
Please advise
Thanks