What do you make of these file\folder names?

Data corruption is a possibility. Another is the folders have been encrypted but that probalby would leave the file system alone and just encrpt the file contents.

@Lightlyseared This guy isn’t smart enough to encrypt them, and Itried copying the folder, NADA. doing it by dragging, right clicking and copying and via CMD line says invalid path. When I try to rename a folder it asks if I want to change the file name, because it might become unusable, and whatever I try it says the file name is too long or something else, no matter how long or short it is.

The filesystem itself is corrupt. I’m not a NTFS guru but I’m pretty sure that the only way to get these symptoms is a messed-up filesystem. The volume will need a low-level format.

Low level format? Really? I would try a regular format first, which will probably make the flash drive usable again.

If he wants the data off of there, that would be a whole other matter.

Well there are other files on the flash drive that work great, I was just wondering what others thought about this before I tried any removal of it.

My advice would be to get what you can and re-format it (FAT32 preferably). If it happens again under normal usage (like, not taking it out when data is being written to it and since the writes sometimes happen in the background it’s best to tell the OS to eject it so it flushes it all to the device and closes things properly) then the drive may be bad.

Before formatting, you may want to try running scandisk on it. If you’re lucky, and if it still does it, it can copy the backup FAT table to the primary and fix it.

If it’s formatted FAT32 you might be able to copy the backup FAT table to the primary FAT table yourself, but I wouldn’t hold much hope for that. And you’d need a sector editor.

Yeah, I used Partition Master to reformat it to FAT32. I was able to save the only important stuff on it.

A little late, but I have to say that I have never seen that on any disk that was still usable or with any files that were salvageable, at least from that portion of the drive. While I would not go quite as far as @koanhead with his “Nuke it from orbit” solution, I would subject that flash drive to all sorts of scrutiny before I trusted it again.

@jerv I scanned it with norton, and Partition Master passes over the drive 3 times during a reformat. I could acronis it, but that seems like a waste of time.

I don’t trust Norton, but for the types of problems I suspect, no antivirus program would help anyways. Bad sectors are a pet peeve of mine.

<sarcasm mode>Didn’t you look at the dates of those files? It’s obviously a drive from the future and you just can’t read it with our pathetic modern technology… yet. Haha sorry I had to. Feel free to flag me as useless. Try setting your bios ahead to those dates and then see if you might be able to access them (no, seriously)... chances are pretty good that your OS can’t read them because it doesn’t think those dates have happened yet. Actually a pretty clever way to disguise stuff if you ask me. It could also just be corrupt data… but the BIOS thing might be worth a try. Also might wanna try renaming the folder once you do that so it’s standard characters. Dunno just thinking out loud… kinda