Ask A Geek

Q: I can’t seem to get a 4GB file off my USB drive.

Q: I have a USB flash drive. I transferred stuff onto it off of a floppy disk and now I have symbols for my writing. How do I get it to be back to English?

Q: Is there any way to retrieve data from a “dead” jump drive. Well, I don’t know if it is actually dead. When I place the jump drive into the USB port, the light flashes two or three times but the computer does not recognize the drive. What can I do, if anything?

Hopeless, confused, frustrated, and saddened that all of my information may be LOST.

Q: Ever since I used a newly bought thumb drive, I noticed my laptop (Acer) hard drive started to have this non-stop cranking as if it is busy loading something between my laptop and the internet – the cranking would reduce significantly if I turn off internet connection (with internet the HD LED light blinks 3x per second, without 1 blink every 3 seconds). Is this a security problem from say a virus from the thumb drive I bought and if so what is the cure?

Q: How do I turn a USB flash drive into a virtual DVD/CD drive to mount virtual DVD/CD?

Q: In these last few days, whenever I attach a new pen drive and optical mouse to my PC, a window comes up requesting for the installation of a new hardware (which obviously is never found because no CD came with the mouse or pen drive).

Subsequently both mouse and pen drive doesn’t work on my PC. I’ve already tried them on my laptop and they worked just fine (with no installation required).

I don’t think it’s a USB problem with my PC because everything else that has long been attached to the PC (through USB connection) works just fine!

Q: My windows XP computer recently got infected with a Win 32 zafi virus. At the time it was infected, I was working from a USB flash drive.

As I work on getting the virus out of my computer, my question is: Is it possible that the virus infected my USB drive as well because it was plugged into my computer at the time of attack? If so, could I infect a clean computer if I insert this USB drive into it?

Q: Every time I try to stop my USB flash drive my computer says “Cannot stop device right now.” Any idea why I am getting that error? I took a look at all my processes and nothing is running.

Q: How do you transfer data from a floppy disk onto a USB flash drive?

A: The process is fairly straightforward and should be simple enough. First put your floppy disk in your computer and then connect the USB flash drive to your computer.

Go to My Computer, you can get there either by going to Start -> My Computer or you might have a My Computer icon right on your desktop.

From there you should see your USB flash drive and your floppy disk drive. First open up the floppy disk drive by clicking on it. Then from there open up another My Computer window and then select the USB flash drive.

Once you have both windows open you can drag the files from the floppy disk drive to the USB flash drive.