How I Recovered data from my Corrupt USB Flash Drive

TestDisk is a free open source software which helps recovering data from a corrupt usb flash drive. Recently my flash drive got corrupted, and was asking to be formatted under windows once plugged in. I tried opening the pen drive under several operating systems including windows xp, vista, windows 7, fedora, ubuntu etc. But in most of them, “Insert a Disk into drive x”  and “Drive is not formatted” error was popping up.

As the data in my removable drive was not that critical, I started experimenting with different free data recovery softwares. Out of them, TestDisk, turned out to be the best in recovering my lost FAT32 partition.

TestDisk Features

• Fix partition table and recover lost/deleted partition
• Rebuild/Recover FAT32 boot sector
• Fix FAT Tables
• Rebuild/Recover NTFS boot sector
• Undelete files from fat, ntfs and ext2 filesystem
• Copy files from deleted partitions
• Supported Operating systems: DOS, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Linux, MacOS X etc

How to Recover Files using TestDisk

Common symptoms or errors seen when a drive gets corrupted is, Windows Explorer shows primary partition as raw or unformatted and Windows prompts this error message.

“The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?”

To recover a partition or repair a file system, you must run TestDisk with full administrator privileges. In Windows Vista, right click Testdisk.exe and select “run as administrator” option.

To recover partition from a media image or repair a filesystem image, run

• testdisk image.dd to create a raw disk image
• testdisk image.E01 to recover files from an Encase EWF image
• testdisk 'image.*' if the Encase image is split into several files.

If the partition was reformatted into other file system use these steps given below.

• run TestDisk,
• select the hard disk and the partition type
• choose Advanced
• select the partition
• choose Type,
• enter the value corresponding to the previous filesystem
• choose Boot
• choose RebuildBS
• List
• If you can see your files, choose Write and confirm
• In Analyse, choose to rewrite the partition with the correct partition type.

Download TestDisk – Windows or go to Official download page

TestDisk For Mac and linux

Other Data recovery software which are actually free Updated: 06 February 2016

2) Recuva

Recuva is one of the popular data recovery software for un-deleting files from usb drive & hard drive. Although Recuva comes in both free & paid version, free version of recuva does have advanced file recovery same as paid version. It even supports data recovery in Windows 10 32bit & 64bit.

Features:

• Undelete files from USB drive & hard disk.
• Recover from damaged hard disks.
• Recover deleted emails from outlook, thunderbird etc
• Recover unsaved Microsoft word documents.
• Recover Apple iphone/ ipod music after deleting.Download Recuva free for PC