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I have an Acer Aspire3 laptop, and I am trying to open up a Memorex 8GB USB stick from the Files application in Ubuntu. I Given that I have important data I don't want to accidentally destroy I don't want to touch anything without an actual human giving me advice.

This USB stick was working before, and the partition looks like this.

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Is there a partition number that comes after the sda part? - No

When I go to find /dev/sda the file sda is something I can't access and Properties tells me it has "0 bytes". I first noticed that this was happening today. It could have been happening earlier, but I never checked.

karel
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FJDpaco
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  • Please read https://askubuntu.com/help/how-to-ask and https://askubuntu.com/help/formatting . Take the [tour]. – waltinator Feb 02 '24 at 18:19
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    Your picture shows you have an 8GB Memorex Swivel with 1 partition, formatted as NTFS, which is not mounted. Was the USB stick in question last used on a Windows system with the "Fast boot" setting enabled?

    The Windows "Fast Boot" setting leaves the disk partition in an undocumented, proprietary state that Linux isn't permitted to recognize. Boot back into Windows and disable "Fast Boot". Be prepared to have to re-disable "Fast Boot" - Windows updates have been known to turn it back on. See https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-windows-10-fast-startup

     – waltinator Feb 02 '24 at 18:26
  • I don't recall enabling a fast boot, and even if I did it would've been quite some time ago and I don't have a working copy of windows anymore. This thing has remained plugged into this laptop for quite some time now and the only time it wasn't was me trying different ports to see if that did anything...

    and yes, this laptop has been solely Ubuntu for all that time

     – FJDpaco Feb 02 '24 at 18:30

1 Answers1

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It appears the volume was damaged or corrupted, using a disk image to create a backup on a blank secondary USB stick; I was able to attempt a repair without having to actually sacrifice data. It appears that none of the files have had any corruption or loss of content and are A-OK. Although I wouldn't really consider this an "answer" to my question, doing this image backup seems to have fixed my major issue. I wish anyone who was in my shoes that this works for you too.

FJDpaco
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