Fix: The Volume Does Not Contain A Recognized File System in Windows 10/8/7

About "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error

You may feel familiar with the following descriptions.

Symptoms

Sometimes, when you plugged in an external hard drive, USB flash drive, SD card or some other storage devices into your Windows computer, Windows prompts "You need to format the disk in drive G: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?"

You might click Cancel to refuse to format the disk or card if there are some important data files. Then Windows will prompt "Drive G:\ is not accessible. The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted." This is how usually "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error occurs in Windows 10/8/7.

Causes

To fix "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error in Windows 10/8/7 without losing data, you should first figure out why this error happens. Why you receive the error message?

As we know, the most possible reason is file system errors. When there is a file system error on your device, it will become RAW, which is not really a type of file system but presents a problem of your drive. It typically occurs when the file system type information is missing or inconsistent between several system tables. Simply speaking, the file system errors that may lead to the issue in the discussion include:

• The file system of your storage device is not recognized by your computer
• The file system of your device is missing
• Your device is not correctly formatted or the file system is damaged

Such errors will happen if you have ever forcibly unplugged your external hard drive from the computer without "Safely removing" them first. After figuring out what results in "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error, fixing it without data loss becomes quite easy. 

Fix "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error and recover data

The most effective way to fix file system related issues is to format the storage device. By formatting, you will assign a new file system to the device, which will make the device usable again. However, since formatting will erase all the existing files on your hard drive, you will need to perform data recovery before the fix if you don't want to lose them all. Therefore, to fix an external storage device that has file system errors, all you need to do is to:

• First, find a reliable data recovery tool to get back the files
• Second, format the device
• And then copy the recovered data back to the device according to your needs.

Procedure 1. Recover data from devices with "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error

Offering powerful and easy RAW recovery solution, EaseUS hard drive recovery software - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard allows you to recover your data from the RAW drive before formatting the device to change RAW to NTFS/FAT32 file system. It is a proven way to solve "Drive is not accessible. The volume does not contain a recognized file system" issue in Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP and Windows Server 2012/2008/2003.

Step 1. Connect your device to PC.

If you lost data on an external hard drive, USB or SD card, connect the device to your PC firstly.

Step 2. Run the data recovery software and scan lost data.

1. Run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard on your PC.
2. Select the device where you lost data under "Hard Disk Drives", "External Devices" or "Specify a location".
3. Click "Scan" to start scanning the lost data now.

Step 3. Preview and restore data.

1. After the scanning, you can double-click each file to preview them from below tabs:

• Delete Files: All your deleted files are listed here.
• Drive (with your device name): It loads found files here.
• Lost Partition Files: Check first if your hard drive is formatted or partition gets deleted.
• Extra Files: All files that lost names or paths on your drive can be found here.

After this, you can even use "Filter" or "Search" to quickly find all your lost data.

2. Finally, you can choose those lost data and specify a safe location on your PC to complete the data recovery process by clicking "Recover" now.

Procedure 2. Fix and repair disk with 'the volume does not contain recognized file system' error

After restoring data from devices which are not accessible or cannot be recognized, you can now follow below steps to repair and fix devices such as external hard drive, USB drive, SD card or hard drive partition etc and repair the file system to be recognizable/detectable again:

• Right-click "This PC"/"My Computer" > "Manage" > "Disk Management";
• Right-click on the RAW drive, USB, SD card... > Format Volume > Reset File System (NTFS/FAT32 etc.) and rename the device;
• Click "Finish" to complete 'the volume does not contain a recognized file system' error repair process on storage devices.

Procedure 3. Copy the files back to your storage device

After formatting your removable disk you can open it and use it for data storage again. You can copy the files you recovered back to your external hard drive, USB, memory card... to make it just like before.

The Bottom Line

If there is no data on the external storage device or you don't want to keep the files on it, you can format the device directly to remove the error message "The volume does not contain a recognized file system." But if you don't want to lose any item, you are highly recommended to retrieve the data first before the formatting. Although EaseUS data recovery software supports formatted data recovery, it's always better to rescue your files before the operation.