I have copied a folder with a bunch of files onto a 2 TB USB drive, which I formatted as NTFS. Some time later, I inserted the USB drive into the computer to look at the files. When I opened the directory, the files weren't there. The directory was still there, but all the files have disappeared. I tried to navigate to that directory within the USB drive. I was able to cd into that directory, but ls returned an input/output error. Attempting to create a new file using the touch command also produced the same error. What is going on?
/media/user/0EB2CB2FB2CB1A5B/monthly_reports$ ls
ls: reading directory '.': Input/output error
/media/user/0EB2CB2FB2CB1A5B/monthly_reports$ touch file.txt
touch: cannot touch 'file.txt': Input/output error
I inserted the USB drive into my Windows PC as an experiment. When I attempt to open that directory using the File Explorer, a message box pops up:
Location not available
F:\monthy_reports is not accessible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
