[DevonS]

I've been running Live from a bootable USB stick on a Zotac box for about a year. Suddenly when I tried to use XMBC last night it wouldn't boot. When I try to boot from the USB on my laptop, I get "Read Error", and that's it. I'd really hate to have to install to another USB stick and lose all my settings and library db etc. Is there any way to recover this stuff and/or figure out why it suddenly crapped out?

[pumkinut]

Flash media has a finite lifetime, esp. USB thumbdrives. It's not only writing to them that causes the media to age, but reading from it as well. You can try to mount the drive on another computer to see if you can salvage anything, it may be just the boot sector that's corrupted, but it could be the entire drive as well.

[DevonS]

That's what I figured. I can't seem to mount it, but I'll have to try a few things. I guess I'll have to install to another usb drive and maybe make backups every once in a while. though, what I'm backing up is a mystery at this point.