Data Recovery Overview

Data recovery is the process of recovering data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible devices. Hard Drives (HDD), storage tapes, CDs, DVDs,Raid Arrays, and media storage cards. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the media storage device or corruption of the file system that prevents it from being Recognized by the operating system.

The most common “data recovery” issue involves the failure of an operating system

We Recovery

• Pictures
• Videos
• Emails
• Documents

How to Repair a USB Flash Drive

Do you have a USB flash drive that just won’t work anymore? Assuming the hardware is undamaged, and you don’t mind losing all your files, you could try formatting the USB drive. Note: The steps below will NOT actually repair physical or internal damage/corruption associated with a flash drive; this guide simply resets your device.

Steps

These steps are for Windows. Steps for other OSs should be similar.

1. Insert the flash drive into a USB port on your computer. If it is detected, it should show up in your “My Computer” after a couple of seconds.
2. Try right clicking on the USB drive icon and then left click on format. Select fat32 for windows operating systems beyond 98. Click “start” and formatting should begin. Note: Formatting will erase everything on the device.
3. Try using the USB drive again as before.

Alternate Method

1. Backup all data from your hard drive to another hard drive or CDs or DVDs.
2. Turn off your computer.
3. Insert the USB drive to a USB port.
4. Turn on your computer.
5. Hit the F8 key when prompted to get to your system bios. Some computers required the Delete key or F2 instead of F8. There should be a note on the screen that specifies the key.
6. Navigate your bios (usually using your cursor keys) to boot from CD drive first. Save and exit.
7. Insert your operating system disc aka Operating System Restore disc. Your computer should restart. If not, restart it yourself.
8. Follow the instructions for installing your operating system. When the option to select which drives to format comes, you should be able to see your USB disk in the list.
9. Format the disk with FAT32 for Win98 or previous. Format with NTFS for anything after e.g. NT, 2000, XP etc.
10. Depending on your options, you may be able to opt out of the operating system install at this point. If it was running well beforehand and you can, leave your other drives alone and quit the re-installation.
11. Reset the computer to boot from the disc drive the operating system is on instead of the CD drive as before. You should have your working flash drive detecting and usable now in windows.
12. If you didn’t get the option to opt out of the re-installation, continue to follow the instructions onscreen and complete the re-installation, formatting whatever drives are required. Note: Do not try to install your operating system onto your USB disk drive. Also be cautious when formatting to keep in mind all data will be lost. Read more…