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I have a few questions regarding reliability of USB flash drivers. Firstly, can the drive be damaged by removing the drive from the computer without first stopping the device? Whenever I remove the drive I always use the Safely Remove Hardware feature to ‘Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device – Drive (E:)’. Once the drive has been stopped, a message appears informing ‘The “USB Mass Storage Device” device can now be safely removed from the system’. The wording of the message implies that removing the drive at any other time is not safe. Sometimes I shut down Windows (or have Windows hibernating) forgetting my flash drive is still connected. Could this damage the drive? Secondly, how durable and reliable are these flash drives? They are still more expensive than hard-disk drives, but I feel inclined to think since they have no moving parts they should be less prone to failure. Is this assumption correct, and would you recommend flash drives for backups?

My USB 2.0 256 MB flash drive (a no-name generic flash drive) has been working great in the past, through directly plugging the drive into a USB port on the computer. However, I recently purchased a non-powered 4-port USB 2.0 hub. When the hub was connected to the computer, Windows seemed to correctly identify and install the hub. I then plugged my USB flash drive into the hub and a message appeared on screen saying ‘Unknown Device’. So I then attached a USB printer to the hub and sent a print job, which printed half of the document and then stopped! However, the printer prints correctly when I connect the printer directly to a USB port on the computer. However, if I try to connect the flash drive directly to a USB port (I have tried all the available ports) it is no longer recognised correctly, and now displays the same ‘Unknown Device’ message. The same result occurs when connecting another generic brand flash drive directly to the USB port on the computer. Uninstalling and letting the system reinstall all the USB devices in the Device Manager does not fix the problem. The flash drive works fine on my work computer and daughter’s laptop, so it doesn’t appear to be faulty. Interestingly, my daughter has an IBM USB 2.0 flash drive which works fine on the computer, and all other USB devices (e.g. the USB printer) work fine. So, it seems the computer just won’t recognise any generic USB 2.0 flash drives. The computer is a Pentium 4 with Windows XP Home Edition SP 2.

For the past six months I have been using a 128MB Sony Microvault USB thumb drive on my laptop running Windows XP. The computer has no contact with the internet, and does not have much additional software installed. Recently, the USB drive has ceased to function, instead producing the error message: ‘The software you are installing for this hardware disk drive has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP’. The Sony site offers drivers for other operating systems, but not Windows XP. The drive still works perfectly with my Linux computer.

Recently I bought a 512 MB Lexar Jump Drive, and I have tried several times to get this working on my Windows 98 computer. I have downloaded and installed the device drivers for the drive, and after about 45 minutes I was able to get the Jump Drive. However, after restarting the computer it would no longer recognise the Jump Drive when connected to the computer. So, every time I restart the computer I must go into the Device Manager to get the Jump Drive to work. How can I get the device to work normally without having to go through this procedure?

Until a few weeks ago my computer had about 45% free space, as indicated by the Disk Defragmenter utility. However, the disk has suddenly become full. We haven't downloaded any large files except Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was 250MB. Looking in ‘Add/Remove Programs’ shows only two large items, which were games occupying about 1 GB each. Something which may have caused the problem was my son loaded a security program from a magazine cover CD. When this program was loaded the antivirus software on the computer would be stuck on scanning this program. Since deleting the security software the antivirus scan sticks at the ‘Disc Cleanup’ stage. How can I solve the antivirus problem, and the issue of my hard drive filling with data? The computer is running Windows XP with a 20 GB hard drive.