This is so fundamental that it defies belief.
Let me try an analogy. I have an answering machine with flash memory. Let's say I have a message on it, and I want to erase it. What do I normally do? Well, I push buttons, go through the menu, and it does the normal erase process. The answering machine identifies the right data blocks, addresses them, and applies a specific voltage to "erase," i.e. reset, the gates in question.
But that's not the only way to erase the data.
Let's say you've called me and are recording a message when lightning strikes a utility pole nearby. Suddenly there's an unusual voltage applied to the EEPROM. Since it's writing, it's already accessed a part of the EEPROM, but it sends the wrong voltage because its power supply can't deal with the spike. Of course, it's likely that lightning would simply blast it to pieces, but let's suppose the lightning strike is almost attenuated by breakers and such, so only the briefest instant of a moderate spike goes through. This spike, and the drop in power afterward, have the potential to affect other cells in the EEPROM. Instead of gently charging a gate to a preset level, all of a sudden there's a time-varying signal, and all of those little capacitances between gates that normally don't do anything react. The spike changes the state of many gates by accident. Those capacitances are always there, and define the maximum speed at which IC's can operate. They also define the IC's tolerance for line noise.
So what may happen is that data is lost. Perhaps the answering machine has its table of contents corrupted, and I lose the whole message as a result. Perhaps it just introduces an annoying "BZZHTHGHGGG" noise in the playback. Or, possibly, it erases everything. All in an instant. Depends on the spike voltage, depends on blind luck.
I can also erase data by hitting it with a hammer. I can obviously damage the circuitry itself, and that will make any data unusable. But it's also possible to do it less destructively, particularly if it is writing while I clobber it. By pounding on the case, I can shake loose parts of the power supply, squeeze things into contact that shouldn't be, or flex cold solder joints. All of which can disrupt the writing process. It may fail to write when it should. It may write wrong bits in longer words, rendering the whole word useless. Or it may corrupt other parts of the EEPROM as well.
Some other things to keep in mind: First is that the FDR is a continuously recording device. It doesn't clean itself before every flight, but instead overwrites old data. So in order to write anything, it has to either overwrite into unprepared blocks or erase previously recorded information. (We're now talking nominal operation, in case you got confused again.) If you interrupt its process in the middle of these steps, you will get some strange results. This is not corruption at all, just what happens when things don't execute cleanly.
Second is that the FDR in question uses Huffman encoding (referred to as "Hoffman" by the NTSB report, but Huffman is the correct spelling) as a compression scheme. Basically all this means is that commonly seen sequences are represented by much shorter symbols; for instance the nominal state of all switches and status during cruise, comprising hundreds of discretes, could be represented by as little as a single (12-bit) word. Or some 12-bit words are reduced to a shorter number of bits, and word length is no longer constant. (I'm not sure which they use in this case.) What is relevant here is that the compression scheme is variable length. It can be very efficient, but it is highly susceptible to corruption. If I flip a single bit in that 12-bit symbol, I have no way of knowing whether I've just invalidated a single measurement or, possibly, hundreds. I may be able to recover the other measurements deductively from the other words, assuming none of them are corrupted, but more often all I can do is dump that data until I come across a valid subframe marker, and start again from there. The amount of corruption we're talking about here need not be very much.
In spacecraft communication, we do not use Huffman encoding for this very reason; instead we use Reed-Solomon encoding, which provides a reasonably efficient error detection and correction mechanism. But this is expensive. We have plenty of time to compress our data, whereas an FDR may not; we also pay a lot more for our data.
Regardless of this, for the last time, the way data is normally erased does not mean there is no other way in which data can be lost. If you can't get past this point, then I'll be forced to conclude you simply do not have the ability to carry on this conversation. It's an embarrassingly simple concept.