Many of us use flash drives - compact carriers of a wide variety of information. Flash drives are used almost everywhere. In the car, at work, at home - everywhere you can see these electronic key chains. But, like any other electronic device, flash drives tend to break sooner or later. A flash drive breaks not necessarily completely and irrevocably, more often write errors just start appearing on them. What do we do in such cases?
The first thing, of course, we are trying to throw off important information from a faulty flash drive. If you manage to do this, then you are definitely lucky. But most often the scenario unfolds in a completely different way. When connecting a USB flash drive to a computer or laptop, it is determined by the operating system as a storage medium of size 0 Mb. In this case, the information can no longer be saved, since it is necessary to format the USB flash drive.
But even at this stage, a trick may await you. It also happens that it is not possible to format the USB flash drive. Windows starts formatting the media, but by the end of the operation, an information window appears stating that formatting cannot be completed. This is the saddest outcome. Windows cannot format a flash drive using standard tools. But, nevertheless, even in this case, there is a chance to save the information carrier.
You can try replacing the drive file system. To do this, use the Windows command line. To call the command line, you must click the "Start" button, then execute and drive in the CMD command. Or it’s easier to do it - press the combination of two Win and R keys , after that, in the window that appears, drive in the CMD command. When a black command window opens in front of you, you need to enter the following: Convert (the letter of your drive): / fs: ntfs / nosecurity / x. Using this command, the drive file system will be converted to NTFS and then formatted. If everything worked out, format the USB flash drive in the standard way. If not, read on.
If the standard Windows tools did not cope with their task, then you can try to format the USB flash drive using the HP USB Disk format tool. This small and, importantly, free program, very often restores the already seemingly permanently lost storage media. If you managed to save the drive, then after successful recovery, you must format it using standard Windows tools. Well, if this program did not help, then we continue to use all methods for data recovery.
Now you need to try to format the flash drive using proprietary utilities for low-level formatting. To do this, you need to know the name of the manufacturer of your faulty drive. If the manufacturer is known, then you need to go to its official website and find the program you need there. This task is not an easy one, since all these sites are mainly English-language. But if you wish, everything can be found. The main thing, you need to remember that when using the wrong program, there is a high risk of permanently ruining the flash drive. If you managed to find such a utility, then with a 90% probability it will help you and the flash drive will work again.
If none of the methods described above helped you and the flash drive did not work, then, no matter how sad it is, you can safely throw this flash drive out. But if it contains very important information, then you can take such a drive to a specialized service center. There, professionals are likely to be able to pull information from your drive and even repair it.
Now you know almost all the ways to recover failed flash drives. Of course, there are many more exotic ways to recover drives, but the methods described in this article usually help in most cases.