▷ How to repair damaged usb with windows 10 [best methods]

Who does not have a USB today? Well today we are going to see how to repair damaged USB with the tools provided by Windows 10. Surely it has happened to all of us that the USB drive has broken or our files have been corrupted. Perhaps we have also seen that our unit appears in RAW format. All this will have an easy solution, so let's see them.

Index of contents

Well, we must take between clamps that of "easy solution". We will obtain a satisfactory solution if the damage caused to the flash drive is not too important, and if it is some damaged sectors, loss of the drive letter, or the lost format (RAW drive).

There may also be more serious errors that have occurred due to continued use of the device, wear of memory cells, or various other causes. Precisely for this reason, we are going to see some preliminary actions to check if our pendrive has a solution.

First, is it detected by the computer?

It seems silly, but the first and most important requirement of all, is that the computer must recognize our damaged USB. Otherwise, there will be nothing to do. Let's see what we can do to make it recognized and we know it.

• Insert the pendrive in the USB port of your PC, if it does not work in one, try a different one. It would also be good if you tried on a different computer or even on another operating system, such as Mac or Linux. It identifies the typical sound that the USB drive when connected

Well, to know if it has been detected, we just have to go to our file explorer and access " This computer ", there should be the damaged USB.

If we don't see it, we can still know if we can really know if our team recognizes it or not. Sometimes the only problem we have is that the USB has lost its letter, and Windows is not able to mount as a valid drive. With this we are precisely going to start with the solutions:

Solution 1: If I don't see the damaged USB on my computer, it's time for Diskpart

We are going to use this solution in the event that our unit is not recognized by our PC or even so, we cannot access it, as is our case. If we click on it, a message appears saying " Insert a disk in the unit ", although we know that it is already inserted.

Diskpart is undoubtedly the star program in storage unit repair tutorials and articles, and this is no exception, and it is a program that is natively installed in our operating system. With Diskpart we can do a lot of things, but for now we are only interested in two very specific ones, so let's proceed.

Let's insert the damaged USB into our computer and then we will open a CMD or PowerShell window. To do this press the keys " Windows + X " and we will open a menu with a gray background, here we are going to select the option " Windows PowerShell (Administrator) ".

Now we are going to write and then press Enter:

diskpart

Now we are going to list the volumes (mounted disk) in our system writing:

list volume

Here we see that all our partitions appear. In one of them we see the name of removable, so we can now repair damaged USB or at least try. In our specific case, we see that the drive (F) does indeed have a letter but a " Not usable " message appears. Anyway, we are going to do the complete procedure to repair the damaged USB.

We identify the unit number (the one that appears in the first column). We wrote:

select volume list partition

To list the partitions that have our USB.

If no partition appears on the damaged SUB

We don't have any, so let's look at the complete procedure to create one. Follow these steps if you don't have a partition either or your drive looks like RAW:

clean

We clean the entire disk.

create partition primary

We create the partition.

select partition 1

We enter inside the partition.

format fs = FAT32 label = USB quick

We format and name the partition. If it is a portable hard disk, we will write "fs = NTFS".

activate

We activate the partition.

assign letter =

Now our USB should be repaired and ready to use. What's more, a file explorer window will open to be able to work with USB.

If a partition appears on the damaged USB

If in your case, when you placed the “list partition” command, a partition appeared on your USB, but it did not have a letter, all you have to do is assign it to it:

list partition select partition assign letter =

It is possible that you can repair damaged USB without losing the files inside. In case you have not been able to, follow the previous section to format and leave it completely clean.

Solution 2: CHKDSK search for damaged sectors and repair them

Do not close PowerShell, because we are going to continue using it, with this method, what we are going to do is analyze the storage unit to look for errors in the sectors or memory cells and thus try to repair them. CHKDSK is a program that is natively installed in Windows and is used in command mode to raparate all kinds of drives.

Well, in this case, we need to know the letter of our damaged USB. We will only have to locate it by going to " this team " and looking in the list of hard drives, the one that corresponds to it. The process does not involve loss of data.

Now we go directly to PowerShell, or CMD as Administrator and write the following command:

chkdsk / x / f :

With this method we will try to repair the unit. If we still cannot use it, we will go to the next method.

Solution 3: format the damaged USB.

This solution is basically what we have done in the section where we have worked with Diskpart. So you can do it from there. If, on the other hand, it is respectful to format the drive in command mode, we can also do it easily from the file explorer.

We go to " this team " and right-click on the damaged USB. At this point we will choose the option " format... ". Note that the process involves the loss of data.

A window like the one shown in the image will appear. In it we will have to choose the file system (FAT32 or NTFS) and the size of the allocation unit, which we can leave as it appears by default. Finally we put a name to the unit and click on " Start ".

We will already have our USB formatted and ready to use.

At this point, if you still cannot use the USB, it is probably irreversibly damaged. So it's time to burn it or take it to specialized personnel, if your files are crucial.

You may also be interested in these articles:

Have you been able to repair damaged USB with these methods, with which of them? Otherwise leave us a comment, or tell us what you have done to make it work on your own.