Corrupted Document Pt. 2

[Robert]

I found out that my friend had been saving the documents to some kind of
memory stick. She was not moving the file to her local drive, just opening
and writing to that memory stick. She sent me a document and Word indeed
says it isn't a "Word" document. I opened it in jEdit and stripped the first
line off and Word would the open it. No formatting, a lot of garbled stuff,
but some of her work was there.

Is it generally bad to read & write to the same memory stick (I am assuming
a USB key of some kind).

Robert

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

It isn't a very good idea to use Word with removable media. Word creates a
lot of temporary files in the same location as the file, which are crucial
to having a functioning Word document. The temporary files go away once the
doc is created, but while one is editing, it means that you need a lot of
disk space. So editing a Word doc off a floppy is a horrible idea, because
Word quickly runs out of space to save temporary files on the floppy disk,
and then you get a corrupt doc.

Memory sticks/flash drives/usb drives/key drives/thumb drives/pen drives are
less susceptible, because they are much larger, but this isn't the first
report I've heard of the same problem happening on flash drives (I suspect
it depends on how long and how intensive the editing is, i.e., how many
temporary files Word has to make; and the size of the key drive). It's
always best to copy the doc to the hard drive, edit, then copy back to the
memory stick.

Sometimes this is not possible in libraries, etc, where they lock down the
hard drive. In that case, *possibly* closing the doc every so often would
help--that wipes out the temporary files and should let Word start fresh,
but it's not like I've tested this theory.

Did Recover Text from Any File in Word not work? I think I've generally
found that gets me most of my text, anyhow...tho it may do no better a job
than jEdit (which I am not familiar with).

Daiya

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Robert:

In addition to what Daiya said, memory sticks must be formally disconnected
by the operating system before they are removed.

The "Safely remove" (Windows) or "Eject" (Mac) command closes all the open
files.

If you do not do this and you just pull the memory stick out, you may not
get away with it. If Word was still in the middle of writing the file when
it happened, she's cactus! If you do this too often, you will roger your
whole memory stick. After that, no file on it can be written or read at
all. You would need to reformat the drive.

There is a bug in OS X 10.3.7 that does not correctly identify a USB memory
stick as having been properly closed, even if OS 10.3.7 itself closed it.
So it always produces an error message on first insertion. You then have to
eject the device and re-insert it to the same machine to get it to work.

It can be fatal to allow the computer to sleep with the memory stick still
connected. Disconnecting the memory stick while the computer is asleep of
shut down is also asking for trouble.

If you impress all of the above on your friend, and lead her to understand
that this is something you must do EVERY time, then she will not have this
problem. If she forgets "just once" that may be the time she trashes the
entire memory stick.

That said, it's fine in my experience to edit on a memory stick, so long as
you remember to eject/put away properly before unplugging it. I wouldn't do
it, because a memory stick is rather slow. But it will work.

Cheers

I found out that my friend had been saving the documents to some kind of
memory stick. She was not moving the file to her local drive, just opening
and writing to that memory stick. She sent me a document and Word indeed
says it isn't a "Word" document. I opened it in jEdit and stripped the first
line off and Word would the open it. No formatting, a lot of garbled stuff,
but some of her work was there.

Is it generally bad to read & write to the same memory stick (I am assuming
a USB key of some kind).

Robert

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Rudy Kohut]

John

I'm using 10.3.7 and a USB memory stick and have not had the problem you
identify below. I wonder if the problem is specific to your set-up?

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Rudy:

No, it's not.

The key to it is having more than one machine involved. I think 10.3.7 is
storing the MAC Address of the key. If you put the key back into the same
machine, no problem: put it into a different one and you will get sworn at
at OS 10.3.7 will mount, then unmount the drive immediately. Pull it out,
put it back in, and it will work.

Happens on three Macs (two PowerBooks and an iBook) with three different
manufacturers of memory sticks. I think some coder somewhere forgot to read
the fine print

Cheers

John

I'm using 10.3.7 and a USB memory stick and have not had the problem you
identify below. I wonder if the problem is specific to your set-up?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Rudy Kohut]

Hmmmmm....

When my daughter was home with her new iBook, I transferred the OS 10.3.7
update using the memory stick, updated her machine to 10.3.7 and continued
to transfer files between machines using the memory stick without having
those symptoms appear. I wonder if the difference is that my 512 MB USB
stick was first formatted on a Windows box (shows up as MS-DOS format)?

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Rudy:

Dunno. I am talking about three OS X machines on 10.3.7 and three data
keys: one formatted on Mac, two on Windows.

All three keys exhibit the same bad behaviour on OS X, none on Windows.

Cheers

Hmmmmm....

When my daughter was home with her new iBook, I transferred the OS 10.3.7
update using the memory stick, updated her machine to 10.3.7 and continued
to transfer files between machines using the memory stick without having
those symptoms appear. I wonder if the difference is that my 512 MB USB
stick was first formatted on a Windows box (shows up as MS-DOS format)?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Robert]

Thanks for all the help and tips. I have indeed passed them on and my
friend was very grateful.

Kudos to you all...

Robert