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Excel files occasionally corrupted by windows xp laptop using flash drive.
This is weird. I have an old hp pavilion dv6 laptop, allegedly windows xp media center edition version 2002 sp3. Yesterday I inserted two different flash drives each containing .xls files as well as other files. I didn't even bother opening the excel files. I had copied them over from a win 7 pro 64 bit machine, and I am sure they were good. When I tried to eject the flash drives from the xp machine I got a message saying that a program was trying to access them. I stopped the drives again and the message went away. I am sure no files were open. When I tried to open the excel files again, I got a message from office saying they were corrupt and probably malicious. I tried to open them anyway and excel could only partially repair them, though they were still readable.
I scanned the xp laptop for viruses using malwarebytes and ms security essentials, nothing. But today I tried again with the same files and no problems. I checked the size of a good and bad file and they had the exact same number of bytes. I ran the comp command and ten bytes were different out of 70,144 bytes. So somehow the xp laptop corrupted that file by substituting bytes... If It is not a virus what could it possibly be, and how do I make sure that it doesn't happen again? Each time I properly ejected both flash drives. Oh, I say it is allegedly media center edition because I just ran sfc /scannow and it prompted me for a windows xp professional disk! Maybe that is the problem.. I got the laptop second hand and don't know what is going on as far as that, my computer says windows media edition. I also checked manually for this cryptolocker virus but saw no evidence of it in the registry or in %appdata%. |
#2
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Never ever open, edit or print from Office files on flash drive. Always copy to and from the flash drive to the hard drive. Flash drives are notoriously unreliable when so used and will corrupt your data if, either you disconnect without closing properly, or there is insufficient room on the drive to accommodate the working files as well as the original file. You may get away with it for a while, but inevitably you will run into the sort of problem you have experienced.
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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019) Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com |
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