In this article, you'll find three effective methods to repair a corrupted pen drive without losing any data. You can try the free pen drive repair software to get things done. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard comes to help and recover data from a corrupted pen drive, USB drive, or SD card.
If you want to repair a corrupted pen drive, you can first try the built-in utility, like Windows Error Checking, or run the CHKDSK command. If you have already backed up your critical files, a full format can be your last resort.
Users are often advised to format their USB flash drives once they encounter USB not working or reading issues. But this method won't work if you have some critical files on the corrupted USB; how to fix a corrupted flash drive without formatting? If you fear losing data on your drive but want to repair a damaged USB, read the following methods.
Are you looking for a way to repair a corrupted pen drive, SD card, or hard drive on your PC, camera or mobile phone? Not sure what to do when a storage device suddenly stops working, gets corrupted, or even becomes unrecognized by your PC?
When a pen drive, USB flash drive, or SD card becomes corrupted, it may stop being detected by a computer, and the data on it may become inaccessible. You'll notice that the pen drive or SD card will not respond to any operations. So, how to fix this problem and repair your pen drive or SD card? Here, you'll find three universally applied pen drive repair tools, together with a piece of EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, in order to perform a complete pen drive/SD card recovery after corruption.
The recommended tools are pretty much the same in terms of effectiveness, so choose the one that best suits your needs.
If there is an idle computer nearby, try it at least once, especially if it's about the USB device not being recognized. This way helps exclude an unsuccessful connection problem.
A drive letter conflict may present you with a nondetectable device, too. You can access Windows Disk Management (This PC/My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management). Do as follows:
Step 1. Open Disk Management by pressing Win + R, then selecting it from the menu.
Step 2. Choose your pen drive and right-click on it and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths".
Step 3. Try to assign a new drive letter to it. With a unique drive letter of itself, the connected drive should show up normally again.
When you find no trace of the drive you've correctly connected in neither the Windows File Explorer nor Windows Disk Management, you might step further to Windows Device Manager. Here is how you can do this:
Step 1. Go to This PC/My Computer -> Manage -> Device Manager.
Step 2. Locate your pen drive from the list and right-click on it.
Step 3. Expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers, right-click each Generic USB Hub, and update the driver until the device appears on the PC again.
If you have specific knowledge of the command line, you can run the CMD command yourself to fix the logical error of your pen drive. Read the following instructions here:
Step 1. Hold Win + R to open the Run box. Type cmd and hit Enter.
Step 2. Press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to run Command Prompt as an administrator.
Step 3. Then, type chkdsk X: /f /r (replace X with your USB drive's letter) and press Enter.
Wait for the process to finish, then check whether your drive is now repaired.
It is also workable to run the Windows built-in tool to check the error preventing your pen drive from working. Here is the detailed steps:
Step 1. Find your pen drive in "This PC"
Step 2. Right-click on your pen drive and choose "Properties" from the drop-down menu.
Step 3. Go to the Tools tab and click Check under the "Error checking" section.
Step 4. Choose "Scan and repair drive" and follow the on-screen instructions.
If you find it hard to repair a corrupted pen drive, you can turn to pen drive repair experts. EaseUS data recovery services offer 1-on-1 remote assistance to fix USB/HDD/SSD issues, recover partitions, wipe data, and more.
Consult with EaseUS data recovery experts for one-on-one manual recovery service. We could offer the following services after a FREE diagnosis.
If all these quick fixes don't work for you, don't worry. In the following paragraphs, you'll find three pen drive repair tools to repair a corrupted pen drive/SD card.
Hopefully, most corruption problems resulting from logical errors have a data recovery solution. If you see the pen drive displaying error messages like "you need to format it before you can use it", "invalid file system RAW", "unallocated", etc., you can happily use professional free data recovery software to retrieve data from it, even if it's inaccessible at the moment. If your files and data saved on the corrupted device are more than 2GB, you'll need to upgrade this free pen drive recovery software to EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard in order to restore unlimited data.
You Can Trust EaseUS Data Recovery Software
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard has acquired an extensive technical base in data recovery and trusted by billions of users since 2005. Check out reviews on Trustpilot.
These steps show you how to get back lost files from a pen drive. You can also apply the method to all Windows-compatible storage drives.
Step 1. Run USB Data Recovery Software
Connect the USB drive or pen drive to your computer and launch EaseUS USB data recovery software on your PC. Select the drive which is labeled as a External drives, and click "Scan for lost data" to start looking for lost files.
Step 2. Scan and Search Lost Files on a USB Drive
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard will thoroughly scan your USB flash drive/pen drive and find all your lost data on it. When the scan process completes, use the Filter feature to find wanted files.
Step 3. Restore All Lost Files from USB
A double-click will allow you to preview the files. Select the target files to restore and click "Recover" to save them to a secure location on your PC or other external storage devices.
This software also has a Mac version; you can perform SD card recovery on a Mac by downloading the Mac version.
After retrieving important data from the corrupted storage device, you can directly format it to repair a corrupted or damaged pen drive or SD card.
Step 1. Connect the pen drive/SD card to your PC.
Step 2. Right-click on This PC/My Computer and click on Manage.
Step 3. Click Disk Management.
Step 4. Right-click the corrupted or non-working pen drive/SD card and select Format.
Step 5. Reset the drive letter, file system, and other necessary settings for the pen drive or SD card.
Step 6. Click OK to finish the process.
You can also watch this video guide to check how to recover USB data in 2 ways:
This post from EaseUS has looked at how to repair corrupted pen drive to restore lost files from corrupted or damaged pen drives. You can run the CMD command, use the Windows built-in error checking tool or even format your drive when you have backups. To get your lost files back, try EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard.
If you still have problems, read on. These USB repair questions and answers can do you a great favor.
1. How do I fix a corrupted USB drive?
Follow the steps below to repair USB drives:
2. How to repair a corrupted pen drive with CMD?
Here is how to fix a USB drive in CMD using the CHKDSK command:
3. How can I recover my corrupted pen drive without formatting?
Follow the steps to recover a corrupted pen drive without formatting:
Related Articles
Hard Drive Spinning but Not Detected? Here Are the Fixes
BitLocker on External Hard Drive: Encrypt & Decrypt Without Recovery Key
SanDisk Memory Card Repair Tool Free Download for Windows/Mac
Repair and Format Corrupted Android SD Card Without Losing Data