Deeply indebted for these very detailed instructions.

Today I've managed to make a proper screenshot of your post, so I can read, view, refer it to more effectively, when offline.

Hopefully tomorrow or so I can give a try on the actions you suggest.

A million THANKS

QUESTION:
I get email alerts about this thread (Thank you.)
But sometimes I click the link, & it displays the thread, but only
as it looked 2 weeks ago!
Many recent posts are not visible.
I struggle with this for a while & sometimes manage to view the latest. Sometimes not.

Any thoughts to enlighten the benighted much appreciated.
THANKS

I remember those! We had one where I worked. The room where it lived had to be kept dust-free with suction pads at the door. and the machine ops worked shifts around the clock to justify the expense of buying it. You coded on forms which a key-punch operator translated into a pack of punched cards. They were run in overnight and you got a list of compilation errors in the morning. I bet it took weeks to get a program working.

1 members found this post helpful.

One difference programming then is you really went over your application many times with a fine toothed comb, so to speak, before submitting it. Not like today where we get lazy and let the compiler find the syntax errors!

1 members found this post helpful.

With the FAT filesystem, you need to consider the 'dirty bit' at bit 0 of byte 0x41 (61) of the first sector.
With Linux, when a FAT filesystem is mounted, this 'dirty bit' is immediately set and will not be cleared until the filesystem is unmounted.
The behaviour in Windows is similar, although later Windows versions may delay setting the bit until something is actually written.
So, you should always eject a device with a FAT filesystem in both Windows and Linux.
If you do not, then when you again plug the device, Windows will prompt to perform a scan to repair the stick.
Linux gives the error message that you posted:
The FAT filesystem keeps at least one backup copy of the file allocation table on the device. It would likely have been possible to have restored the primary file allocation table on the device from a backup copy with fsck.vfat.

1 members found this post helpful.

Were you ever a key-punch operator?
"Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate!"

Out of curiosity have you tried repairing the filesystem yet?

I'm back here in the bleary hours again, making screenshots of instructions; which I haven't enough brain cells to read with comprehension at the moment.

Astrological conditions are due to change in a few days: to more optimum climate for technical projects.
So I might do well to wait to try these action then. (Better not take any chances!)

(By the way, when I say GOBBLEDYGOOK I don't mean reasonably normal code in which one can make out anything intelligible.
I mean this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lvM...ew?usp=sharing
(What Windows did to my files. Can anyone can read this? Or have a clue what it means?
But that's a moot point now. I'm resigned I have to arrange never to put a stick into Windows again.)

THANKS to all here. And to rokytnji for the How-to book links!

I do see, acknowledge, and agree with your distinction between different types of gobbledygook

Regarding the stuff that flashes by in dmesg and during startup... well, even though that is reasonably normal output, when I first saw it, so much in it was cryptic and mysterious enough, that I've called it gobbledygook plenty myself throughout years of being mystified.

But regarding the gobbledygook in your screenshot, some of which look like hieroglyphs: just a guess, but it could be related to mismatches in font and language settings between the windows and linux environments--even within the same os, there can be such mismatches, such as when utf-8 based language and font systems try interacting with ascii based systems... most everything modern has jumped forward to using utf-8 because it supports all the fonts necessary for foreign languages as well, and so has better support for internationalization...

utf8 became default in slackware linux in version 15, which was only recently released, and I am not familiar with every distro of linux's default setting, nor windows--they all provide methods to set it system wide, but if the user has not done that, and the default utf8 of one system is sharing text with a system that defaults to older ascii system, then the system without the right font to display the text, will try what it thinks is the right font, creating some crazy glitchy outputs with hieroglyphs and runes and math symbols, and there might even be font sets of clip art...

that's just a guess as to why the output in your screenshot was so foreign...

Greetings, & many thanks for all your very kind & knowedgeable assistance.

Linking zip folders with a minimum of Terminal SCREENSHOTS to show what happened when I did fsck etc. *

(When it did the same thing to 245 files, I tried to show only one screen; while trying to include every action which appeared.)

Includes Screenshots of PERMISSIONS box AFTER fix operations.

Terminal Screenshots: 1st time thru Commands
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ikD...ew?usp=sharing

Terminal Screenshots: 2nd time thru Commands
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cim...ew?usp=sharing

What Linux was detecting as a problem seems to be
the files reduced to Goobledygook by Windows,
(which I tried several times to delete; can't seem to be deleted by either Windows or Linux (even if apparently empty)

After running Commands:

PERMISSIONS info for this Stik UNCHANGED.

NOTE "Me" seems to have full access i.e. Create & Delete.
But USER (the actual account I have to use to get into my computer) is still Read-Only

QUESTION 1: "user" v "Me" v "root"
In all the extremely helpful info provided here, of course not all questions have been answered yet.

And/but wasn't this the first one?
(re info in PERMISSIONS Screenshots):
HOW does "Me" (as in pathetic little carbon-based entity I)
become the same as "user"??
(the account I have to use to get into my computer?)
HOW & WHY are they different here, with different permissions?

Yes, I realize perhaps one is "root" me. (user@user perhaps...?)
But how do I get the computer to recognize user IS ROOT?

QUESTION 2: "Not cleanly unmounted"
Begging pardon if I've missed anything due to bleary screen blindness,
but no one seems to have said anything / found fault with my described practice of putting the computer to sleep to remove sticks.

I suspect the "not cleanly unmounted" is the same problem which caused me to eschew trusting sticks in Linux years ago: when I hit "eject"; but Linux started writing to the stick while it was in the process of being pulled out, erasing the entire contents.

QUESTION 3:
IS Linux "asleep" when it says it is / when I tell it to "suspend"?

Something alarming happened the other day.
One of the extra sticks I've been using
happens to have one of those little flashing lights in it.

Usually, put the computer to sleep. The lights stops flashing. Pull out stick. No probs.

Except the other day, I put it to sleep, the little "moon" indicator comes on, I go to pull the stick,
and notice the light on the stick is FLASHING.
There is some activity: the computer is doing some bleeding thing with the stick when it's supposed to be asleep!

Only most of my sticks don't actually have little flashing lights anymore.
So this could happen anytime, while the computer seems to be asleep, moon indicator on, etc.

Would welcome any thoughts.
With a million thanks

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *
"Fortune favors fools."

WoW! You really had a lot of errors on that drive! Thank God I don't have to dual-boot with Windows!

The permissions window that you saw was provided by your graphical file manager and the labels are designed to be easily understood by newbies but imho they've just made it more complicated. So here is the more basic level of truth:

Every file and every directory on Linux is owned by a user and a group. The user in this case is you (called "me" in this display but the actual name is the name you log in with). The group that you belong to (and that all your files belong to by default) was assigned by the system when you created your user account. Most modern Linux systems create a unique group for each user with the same name, but some have a group called user or users for all personal users. If you click on the arrow, you should see what group names are available.

When a file is created, it belongs to the user who created it. If you created it as root, then it belongs to root and to the root group. But if you created it as molly and then become root, the file's ownership does not change unless you change it. And only root can change the personal owner of a file.
To unmount a disk "cleanly", you have to use the umount command. This will synchronise the disk to the latest versions of its files and then remove it from the mount list. Only then should you unplug it. Just waiting, or even putting the computer to sleep, isn't good enough.
Yes. There is also a state called hibernation when the computer copies the contents of memory to disk and then switches itself off completely. When you start it up again, it will go back to where it left off. But in the suspend/sleep state, a thin current of electricity keeps the memory working until you wake the system up again.
That's why you should always use the umount command. There shouldn't be an more disk acrivity after that.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for that. I did read this before, but in a blur, before I got a chance to sit down & really study all the info here.

So how would I assure that my sticks/filesystem is "ntfs-3g"?
(I'll try to study the wikipedia page you've kindly linked, cuz I haven't a clue at this writing what NFTS means.)

NTFS (New Technology File System) is an unsteady file system (aka disk format) used by m$ systems. You can examine your device for it using GParted, if you are careful. It will be in one of your desktop's system menus.

ntfs-3g is a software package that allows your Linux kernel to write to ntfs-formatted partitions. By itself, the kernel can read these disks but not write to them. Trust Microsoft to invent a file format that no other system can use properly!

NTFS would be more resilient to errors then FAT.

The operating system buffers writes and the system is probably flushing data to the drive before it goes to sleep. How long it takes depends on how much data you were trying to write. Because writing to disk especially a flash drive is slower most writes happen in the background.