I'm having some major problems getting tails to work. I've had it running before and made 4-5 orders but for some reason the flash drives I'm using keep getting corrupted. I make sure to close out of it correctly every time but for some reason after ~10 uses of the flash drive my persistance doesn't load right and when I try to go back in the whole flash drive locks up and you cant get into it at all.
Usually this isn't a problem, I've never had to message a vendor so I don't care about keeping PGP keys, so I always just clone a new copy of tails and move on. But now all my my flash drives with tails on them are fucked up and I can't seem to get a new copy installed on any of them, even after formating. Should I go out and buy new flash drives that haven't been fucked with before? Do cheap flash drives shit out quickly when running tails?
The error message I'm getting when trying to boot the new copy of tails is:
Loading Live/initrd2.img failed : I/O error
tl;dr: My tails drive is unbelievably fucked, should I buy a new one and start from scratch? And if so, whats the best way to install tails to a flash drive? I downloaded new 2.0.1 iso and am using rufus to mount it to the flash drive
I would suspect some kind of hardware fault. Either the drives are shite (get better ones that aren't on this list: https://tails.boum.org/support/known_issues/#index1h2 ), or there's something faulty with either your computer's power supply (a likely candidate), memory (also likely), motherboard/CPU in general (less likely) or USB port or controller (least likely, but still possible).
One decent test you could run would be to run MemTest86+ overnight, or possibly for a full 24 hours, and see if it catches any errors. It's included on many GNU/Linux live isos (though not Tails's, unfortunately). A MemTest86+ error (even a single one) in that time would be indicative of bad memory, but could also point to a bad power supply or motherboard/CPU issue of some kind.
You might try making a fresh drive, and then using it in a different (trusted) computer for a while and see if the same thing happens.