I just plugged in my USB drive and suddenly found 76 new files on it, but they have really weird names that are just a few characters long. When I tried to delete them, Windows said the names were too long. To make things worse, the date on these files shows as 01/01/1988 at 00:00 AM. I'm really worried about this. Could it be that my files are corrupted, or did I possibly get a virus? Should I avoid plugging it back in?
3 Answers
Sounds like your USB drive might be failing. If the files keep showing up with odd names, it's a sign that something’s not right. You should probably look into getting a new drive soon.
This definitely seems like a corrupt file system issue. If you have important data on there, I recommend not plugging it in too often. Repeatedly connecting it might make recovery tougher. Consider imaging the drive or using a data recovery tool before attempting any fixes.
Another thing you can try is renaming those files to shorter names. Windows is tricky with long paths because it disables them by default, so that might help you delete them.
Gotcha, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into recovery tools instead.