Posts Tagged ‘usb drive’

Vista’s Persistent “Scan And Fix” Issue

Monday, April 20th, 2009

My thumbdrive has been plagued with this issue for centuries!

vista64persistentscanandfix

Each time I plug in my thumbdrive, I would have to click Continue Without Scanning, as I knew my drive is in (somewhat) perfect condition. Of course, being the lazy ass bum that I was, I decided enough is enough. As usual, Google to the rescue! And within seconds, I found the answer!

The problem was that I have not always been very diligent in clicking Safely Remove Hardware before ejecting the drive. I do that most of the times, but there were quite a few moments where I would just forcibly eject the drive. Of course, I did this fully aware that there were no write operations going on at the time. Never ever eject a drive while it is writing something to the drive! Of course, this means no pulling out the drive when you’re copying/moving files in, running programs (like PortableApps) from it, or even during boot-up. I’ve heard of a few cases where it totally killed the drive. Though I can’t verify the authenticity of such stories, I would rather play it safe than sorry when it comes to my own data.

I did the fix recommended by the site and it resolved my issue! Amazing! I reproduced the problem and re-tried the fix, and again it worked the second time. Nice.

The fix is to select Continue Without Scanning when you receive the message. Then immediately open the Windows command line and run chkdsk drive /f, where drive is your USB drive.

vista64persistentscanandfixgone

I guess this is one of those instances where Vista adheres strictly by its rules, but instead comes off as annoying. Wait a sec, Vista abiding too hard and not being flexible, coming off as annoying?

(Vista == SG ruling party) ? "Yikes!" : "...";

[Resolve Vista Scan and Fix Error When Plugging in IPOD or other Devices]

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Portable Apps Junkie

Monday, January 12th, 2009

I had recently purchased a Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB from newegg.com. A friend of mine was recently transferred back from the US, so I took advantage of Black Friday.

I had knew about portable apps for a long time now, but didn’t really go into it much. I didn’t have a USB thumb drive before, so I used it in conjuction with Dropbox. Since Dropbox has a 2GB limit, I didn’t really put much apps into it. Now that I have an 8GB drive, and I barely know what to make use it for, I decided to move my Portable Apps into it.

There are other portable suites out there, like Pen Drive Apps or the looks-proprietary U3. But I guess I’m most familiar with Portable Apps. I’ve been thinking about putting a whole OS into it, but then I will have to boot from it each time to use. Ubuntu Portable sounds cool in theory but not very useful. Since my home and work OS are both Windows (Vista 64 and XP respectively), Portable Apps works just fine.

These are the official portable apps stuff I’ve got in:

  • 7-Zip Portable
  • DosBox Portable
  • FileZilla Portable
  • Firefox 3 Portable
  • Notepad++ Portable
  • PuTTy Portable
  • VLC Media Player Portable

PuTTy and FileZilla portables are lifesavers! One aspect I liked is I am able to add my own stuff in, like:

  • utorrent
  • Genesis Emulator (gens)
  • NES Emulator (fceux)
  • SNES Emulator (snes9x)
  • Madness Interactive

I’ll probably add more soon.

I have also recently discovered PTC, which expands the capabilities of the Portable Apps menu, allowing you to rename apps on the menu, change the theme, always stay visible, add categories, etc. It’s a pretty cool hack that I heartily recommend to anyone who is as fond of customizations as me.

Now who’s crazy enough to set up World Of Warcraft as a portable app? (Of course, I don’t recommend doing it. For one thing, the amount of read/writes will probably kill the flash drive faster than usual. And I’m not sure how the USB transfer bottleneck will contribute to the online lag.)

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