I have got a 240GB USB, tried to format the partition all does well, until I removed the USB and all files saved in it are vanished, indeed system shows the used space but no files.

It looks like Files listing is disabled.

How do I enable them ?
I used chown, chgrp, chmod even with ROOT USER but it replied "operation not permitted".

<fdisk shows the used space, files that I saved before and after umount and mount again, they were disappeared but are listing in the used space>


root@adam:/media/disk# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 240G 24M 240G 1% /media/disk




<no sign of files>
root@adam:/media/disk# ls -lha
total 16K
drwx------ 2 adam root 16K 1970-01-01 03:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 328 2007-12-01 12:04 ..


root@adam:/media/disk# du -hs .
16K .



Any Idea?

What kind of disk is it and what is the filesystem? Is it the kind of USB disk that includes a real hdd inside an enclosure or is it a 240GB flash disk? I've seen this problem occur with a Sony Vaio 32GB flash disk (yes, it actually has the Vaio logo on it). After some Google searching I found out the disk is fake, hacked to show 32GB capacity but is so unstable that this is normal behavior for such and so is useless.

Hopefully this isn't your problem.

Its a Sony Micro Vault 240GB written on it. It worked fine when I made only a 60GB Partition and thats the only partition that is shown while others are not format to any file system.

I google it but did not able to find any clue, one of my friend has got this from garbage. Windows cannot make it any partition,

I used these steps in Linux:

1) using FDISK partition it. Successfully
2) using mkfs.vfat .. 1st partition is fine, rest cannot be formatted.
3) Problem is that with any size of partition, one can use it, add, delete, list; but after umount saved data disappear, not hidden. as
df -h shows the used space but there is no file seen.

Any clue?

This might be a clue itself. See if the friend knows why it was put in the garbage. And, more importantly, where the owner got it from.

Another clue would be that the largest Micro Vault currently on the market is 8GB.

http://www.sony.net/Products/Media/M...t/product.html

And if I'm not mistaken this is the biggest flash drive currently on the market.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/07/k...ax-only-2-800/

This is where I looked to verify the Sony drive I previously mentioned. The comments are full of people saying their files just disappear.

http://migs.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/32g-microvault-p1/

In my experience I only lost files after copying about 7GB, and the files that did show were unreadable. For MS Office files I saw the same errors shown in the screenshots.

Sorry, but, I think you got a fake.