The USB drives have become an important part in our work and personal life thanks to its portability, ease of use and large capacity in file storage. While USB drives are pretty reliable, there is nevertheless still a small percentage failure rate, and USB drive corruption is one of the most frequently happened issues. A USB drive can get corrupted due to varied reasons, from sudden power failure, improper operation, unplugged directly without ejecting to USB failures like file catalog corruption, etc.

Usually, you will be told to re-format that USB drive in order to make it usable again. But the cost is you’ll lose all the files stored on that USB drive. Today, we will show you how to fix corrupted USB drives without any data loss.

Disclaimer: please always make backup copy of your files before using any of advices provided here. If not sure, seek a qualified assistance before proceeding on your own!

For Windows users:

Solution 

Check if the corrupted USB drive has a correct drive letter, if not, assign one to it.

Right-click Start icon.

Select Disk Management and click on it.

Right-click the corrupted USB drive and choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths…”

Click on the drive letter and click Change button.

Choose a different letter from the drop-down list and click OK.

Done

Solution 2: Update device drivers

It’s possible that the driver of the USB drive is out of date or corrupted itself. So updating the driver may solve this problem.

Right-click Start icon and choose Device Manager.

Click Disk drives and find the driver name of the corrupted USB.

Right-click on the name and choose Uninstall device.

Unplug the USB drive.

Replug the USB drive into the computer and it will reinstall the latest driver automatically.

Solution 3: Use CMD

Step 1: 

Type: cmd into the search box, then right-click it and select “Run as administrator”.

Step 2: 

Type chkdsk #: /r and press Enter. Here you need to replace #: with the drive letter of the corrupted USB drive.

For Mac users:

Mac computers have a built-in troubleshooting tool known as First Aid in Disk Utility. It’s able to detect and repair disk problems such as directory damage on any HFS, HFS+ and APFS hard disks or volumes. You can also try to fix corrupted USB drives with First Aid.

Go to Applications > Disk Utility.

Select the USB drive from the sidebar of Disk Utility.

Click First Aid on the top of the window.

Click Run on the pop-up window.

Wait until the scanning process finished.

You’ll then see if First Aid has successfully repaired the corrupted USB drive.

If none of the solutions above worked with your USB drive, then, you have to proceed to re-format the drive in order to re-use it. But before that, you can recover your files from the corrupted USB drive with the help of a third-party data recovery program. Below is the tutorial.

Use third-party data recovery software

What you need:

A corrupted USB drive.

A computer, Windows or Mac.

A data recovery program that is compatible with your computer.

In this tutorial, we’re using iBoysoft Data Recovery which is available for both Windows and Mac.

iBoysoft Data Recovery is able to recover photos, videos, documents, emails, music files from USB hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, Pen drives, CF cards and other external storage media. It deals with formatted drives, corrupted drives, unmountable drives, RAW drives in a simple way.

Step 1: Plug the corrupted USB drive to your computer.

Step 2: Download iBoysoft Data Recovery or download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac. Install it on your computer.

Step 3: Launch the progam.

Step 4: Select the USB drive.

Step 5: Click “Next”. The program will start scanning the files. Please note there are two scan options: Quick Scan and Deep Scan, which you can adjust manually. But it is highly recommended to use the default settings.

Step 6: Click on the scanning results and preview. Choose whatever you want to get back.

Step 7: Click “Recover”. Done.

Besides iBoysoft Data Recovery, you can also give Recuva a try which is though well-known for deleted files recovery.

Reformat the USB drive

After recovering all the files, you can head to re-format the USB drive.

For Windows users:

Right-click Start icon.

Select Disk Management and click on it.

Right-click on the USB drive and select Format.

Offer the required info and click OK. Done.

For Mac users:

Go to Applications > Disk Utility.

Select the USB drive from the sidebar of Disk Utility.

Click Erase on the top and follow the steps it requires. Done.

Hope it helps.