When I was shopping around in Hong Kongs dark deep electronic market stalls I was obviously wary about buying any products.  I was in the need for a new memory stick but knew the risks of buying abroad as well as the possibility of shoddy goods.  With this in mind I still went and bought an 8gb USB Kingston memory stick for just £6.00.  To be honest with a saving like that I took the risk knowing it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it broke.

Well my words seemed to jinx it and after a successful two week usage period I encountered the beginning of the end.  I use my memory stick between two different Operating Systems with Mac OS X and XP so I tried to minimalise any potential system conflicting errors by having it formatted in the FAT 32 system.  I first hit problems while transferring large files where Mac OS X used to hang on the process so I thought “Ok small error it won’t happen again.”  I was wrong again and while transferring even small pictures I then discovered when I plugged in to another computer, all that was copied was the file name but no data. This situation continued for a couple more weeks until it seemed it had had enough – the next time I plugged it in it was recognized as 8mb in size not 8gb.  So it seemed it had bitten the dust so I tried the following:

1. Backed up what data I had on the memory stick however by this time it was already corrupt.  Luckily only a few non-essential files were lost.
2. Tried Mac OS X’s disk utility to repair any permissions but this option was not available
3. Finally reformatted the memory stick in a hope to start a fresh.

After these steps I had limited success initially but within the hour I knew it was past help.  I also tried data recovery programs like Data Rescue and some others to no avail – if you have any ideas go ahead and comment below and I’ll give them a go as I have nothing to lose!  From my limited knowledge I believe there was probably a bad memory sector on the flash drive and that equates why the computer reads a capacity of only 8mb.  It’s a real shame because I could really use a USB drive bigger than 2GB and I’ve learnt two lessons from this experience. Spend more time researching products and buy from a reputable company and never, NEVER rely on a memory stick for your data. Always have a hard copy on a DVD or other hard drive if the data is that important. Lessons now learnt – lets move on.