I have a lot of files on a 128GB USB stick to transfer between computers. I've been updating the the stick regularly but manually. Last time I did this I was going to copy from the stick to my main PC under Ubuntu but the directory structure and files are now all messed up - difficult to describe, see the pics. I tried in Windows but the files are still a mess. I tried to the repair the stick with Windows GUI method and then chkdsk but no faults were found, even though there clearly is a fault.
Here is what the structure should look like:
Here are a few samples of what the root looks like now:
That's 255 folders with nonsense in them. There are then still some valid folders but they shouldn't be in the root.
And there are 16661 of these messed up files. There are many other files in the root but they shouldn't be there, they should be deeper in the directory structure.
I searched all over stackexchange and the web in general but couldn't find any other example of this. To me it looks like the "file allocation table" got corrupt but still works, somehow. Does ExFAT have a backup FAT I can use a cmd-line utility to point to? Under Windows or Linux?
There are approximately one week's of files I am missing, but it's an important week (it always is, isn't it?!).
Thanks 🙂