How to Repair a USB Drive
Have you ever had to repair a USB drive? Flash drives are a great convenience of modern computing. They can hold gigabytes of data and are usable on almost any computer whether they run Windows, Linux or Mac. Once in a while though, a USB drive can start acting funny. Some files can no longer be accessed or the computer can't read all of it or the drive just doesn't get recognized by the computer anymore. Often just removing the drive and re-inserting it will make the drive work or rebooting the computer can help. But if this keeps on happening, you should really repair the USB drive before you lose data you can't afford to live without. Here are a few things to try to repair a broken USB drive.
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Instructions
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Do a virus scan on the USB drive. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with the flash drive, it just has a virus which is interfering with the operation of your computer. Since USB drives can be passed from computer to computer, they are prime candidates for computer viruses. Sometimes a virus will make a flash drive act funny and removing the virus will fix the issue.
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If the virus scan not find any viruses, try checking for disk errors and repairing them. To scan for errors on a windows machine, insert the USB drive into the machine. Click on the drive you want to scan and select properties. In the properties window, select on the Tools tab and push the "Check Now" button. Select both repair bad sectors and file system errors boxes in the "Check Disk Data" window and start the scan. The process will scan the USB drive for any disk errors and try to repair them. The repair may destroy the damaged files but many times will salvage the rest of the USB drive.
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If the disk repair did not work, the best way to repair the USB drive is to format it. This can fix many problems with a USB drive. Before formatting a drive, make sure to back up any critical data. Then insert the drive into a windows computer, right click on it and select the format option. This will bring up the format window, make sure it is NOT setup for a quick format and start the process. A quick format just rewrites the master directory table. This type of format will not touch the rest of the drive and will not fix any errors not on the master directory. Most of the time, the newly formatted USB drive will be repaired.
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Tips & Warnings
For maximum compatibility when formatting to repair a USB drive, select FAT file system and with the default allocation size. If FAT is not available, choose FAT32. NTFS file systems are not compatible with many computers and devices.
