Can not using the “safely remove drive” kill a flash drive?

dalek_sec986: Can not using the “safely remove drive” kill a flash drive?
My sister said she took her USB out of a school computer without doing the “safely remove hardware” thing and now when she puts it in at home nothing happens. The light doesn’t come on and it doesn’t show up on the drive list either. Could not “safely” taking it out have killed it? Can it be fixed?
We have tried it on both a PC and a Mac.
So there’s absolutely no way to get the files off of it?

Answers and Views:

Answer by tuaamin13
Yes, it could have broken if the files were still being written to the flash drive. When you yank them out, the some of the files could have become corrupted. In this case, the flash drive may not work.

Answer by styrckt
yep,, she screwed it up…it was still writing when she snatched it out

Answer by Swibs
Yes.

This is a file system thing. Your computer transfers data to and from the device asynchronously. This means it dumps all of the data into what’s called a buffer, then the data is written from the buffer to the device.

The buffer acts like a funnel. Since data can be written to the device only so fast, the buffer holds the data waiting to be written. It’s much faster for applications to dump data into a buffer for background transfer (asynchronously) than to sit and wait for it all to transfer in real time (synchronously). Realistically, it happens at the same speed, but asynchronous transfers allow you to push the slow transfer to the background and continue working.

The “safely remove” option “syncs” and flushes the buffers, making sure all of the data has been written to the device before giving an “all-clear” to remove it.

You never really know if the disk buffer has data in it (“dirty buffer”), so it’s important you use the “safely remove” function.

Removing the device with dirty buffers can, and usually will, kill the file system on the device. This will make it unreadable. The only way to fix it is to reformat, destroying all of the data.

You can set up your computer to always use synchronous transfers, meaning you can pull the device at any time without having to “safely remove”. Google for instructions.