Recovering a Partially Formatted USB Thumb Drive
To attempt to recover a USB drive back to usable state, you should try these commands.
First it should be noted that you should have Windows 7 installed on a computer that you have access to, so that you can use the diskpart
command. You'll also need to have administrator access on this computer.
- Click on the Start Orb.
- Type
cmd
into the search box. - Shift + Right Click on the CMD icon.
- Click on
Run as Administrator
.
From here, we are going to type in diskpart
and run the following commands.
C:\Windows\system32>diskpart
Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: DYGEAR-PC
DISKPART>
From here we are going to type list disk
to find the current drives connected to the computer.
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 14 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 74 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Online 698 GB 0 B *
Disk 3 Online 15 GB 0 B
The 15GB drive is the drive we are looking for, as that's the size of our USB Thumb Drive. So to select that drive, we run the command select disk 3
.
DISKPART> select disk 3
Disk 3 is now the selected disk.
If you are not sure if this is your drive, you can request details about the drive by running the command detail disk
after you have selected the disk.
DISKPART> detail disk
Corsair Voyager Mini USB Device
Disk ID: 00000000
Type : USB
Status : Online
Path : 0
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : UNAVAILABLE
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 4 Removable 15 GB Healthy
After we have correct drive, we can select any partitions on the drive select by doing select volume
and then the volume number like in our case select volume 4
.
DISKPART> select volume 4
Volume 4 is the selected volume.
From here, we will try to recover the drive to a useable state. We are going to attempt to reformat the drive first. FORMAT RECOMMENDED OVERRIDE
is the safest way to format your drive back to a normal state.
DISKPART> FORMAT RECOMMENDED OVERRIDE
DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
Should that not work, such as shown above, we can try to run a format command that tells it how to format the drive in our case we use FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL="Windows7" QUICK COMPRESS
.
DISKPART> FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL="Windows7" QUICK COMPRESS
DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
In our case, this still does not work. So we attempt to clean the whole drive with the command CLEAN ALL
.
DISKPART> clean all
DiskPart has encountered an error: Incorrect function.
See the System Event Log for more information.
If we still are having trouble with the drive at this point. Let's try and list the partitions again, see if any changes have been made to the drive with LIST PARTITION
.
DISKPART> list partition
There are no partitions on this disk to show.
As there as been a change, let's see if we can get the drive online with ONLINE DISK
.
DISKPART> online disk
Virtual Disk Service error:
This disk is already online.
As the driver is online we can now try and clear any attributes that might be in our way such as the read only attribute. We run ATTRIBUTES DISK CLEAR READONLY
.
DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly
Disk attributes cleared successfully.
Let's see if we can put a boot record on there with CONVERT MBR
.
DISKPART> convert mbr
DiskPart successfully converted the selected disk to MBR format.
DISKPART> create partition primary
DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.
DISKPART> select part 1
Partition 1 is now the selected partition.
DISKPART> active
DiskPart marked the current partition as active.
DISKPART> format fs=NTFS label=USB quick
DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
DISKPART> format quick
DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
DISKPART> assign letter F
DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
DISKPART> list volume
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 V Video NTFS Simple 698 GB Healthy
Volume 1 D SSD NTFS Partition 14 GB Healthy
Volume 2 System Rese NTFS Partition 100 MB Healthy System
Volume 3 C NTFS Partition 74 GB Healthy Boot
* Volume 4 Removable 15 GB Healthy
As noted all of these commands failed from that point. So we should try one last thing to get the drive working again. In this case, what you should do is uninstall the drivers for the USB thumb drive and then reinstall the drivers again after restarting your computer.
Take a look at the Format utility from the SD-CARD Organization.
Or you could try using a Windows 98 Boot Disk after using Lexar's USB Flip the Removable Media Bit Tool.
Use the HP Drive Key Boot Utility or HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool 2.2.3, command line or GUI version.
Mark Tomlin's post didn't help me, fdisk from linux did.
fdisk /dev/sdX
This will give you the fdisk prompt:
Command (m for help):
It's intuitive and you can use the following options:
c (to activate DOS-mode, although it may not be necessary)
n (to create a new partition, fdisk will suggest sane values like partititon number and size - for a thumb-drive you'll most like want a full-disk partition, so you'll mostly press <enter> here)
t (choose c for a FAT 32 (LBA) partition type)
a (optional, to flag the pen-drive as bootable)
w (to write changes to disk and exit)
And you're done. Obviously, this procedure will destroy all data in your thumb drive, but the original question pertains to recovering a "dead" drive into a usable state, not to recover its contents. (i'd comment on James T's answer but apparently i need more points for than than to write an answer)