How to Recover Data from a USB Drive Which is Unrecognizable

Electronic devices are made by humans, but their life possibilities are not the same as ours. These devices can work for a maximum of a few years and are prone to failing one fine day. But if you are the one whose device is not so old but still stopped working, then you still have a chance to easily repair your USB drive. Drive failure can happen due to physical or logical damage. Physical damage includes accidentally dropping the drive, water or tea or any fluid spilled on the drive, etc. These kinds of issues can cause physical damage to the USB drive. On the other hand, logical damage includes software failure, malware attack, improper drive ejection, etc. which is easy to repair with manual repair methods in comparison to physical damage.

Now, let’s discuss what if the drive is physically damaged? What if it stopped working after water spilled on it? Will drive ever be able to be recognized by the system? The answer to this question is Yes, absolutely drive can be fixed, but the methods are not promising for fixing the physical damage. In my experience, these methods are more dependent on luck. For example, if the drive is damaged due to water, then the first suggestion you might receive is to get it dry under the sunlight and then check if it starts working again. Another method, possibly the one which is from the old school, is to keep your drive under the rice. So, the methods of repairing the physically affected drive are mostly speculative or based on guesswork.

Before moving to fix it, first, you should know the reasons for the logically affected drive. Check the cause of the unrecognized drive and follow the below steps.

• Type “Create and format hard disk partition” in the Windows search bar.
• Click on “Create and format hard disk partition”. This will take you to the disk management window.
• Now, you can see all the available drives in your system.
• Check the USB drive status

Is it showing unallocated, or without a drive letter or RAW?

After ensuring the cause behind the unrecognized drive, let’s move on to fixing methods. Let’s take the scenario one by one and so the fixes.

First Case: USB Drive It turned RAW. This error comes when the drive’s file system stops working and it makes the drive unrecognized. To make the drive visible again, you need to format it, but before this, use data recovery software to recover data from a RAW format hard drive. I would recommend using Stellar Data Recovery Standard software. This tool is from a trusted company, an affordable one, and is perfectly designed to work on RAW format hard drives. Use that tool, and once the data is recovered, just format the drive using the diskpart command and create a new fresh partition.

Second Case: Drive letter missing. If this is your case, then I would suggest you assign the letter to that drive. You simply need to right-click on that drive and click on the change drive letter. By reassigning the drive letter, you will be able to fix this drive invisibility issue.

Third Case: Drive driver software is not updated, and this can lead to driving unrecognition issues. Now, how can you check whether the drives are not updated? Just go to the device manager and click on Disk Drive. Under this, you will find all the available drives in your system. See if there is a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. If it is there, then it is time to update the drive driver software. Just do a right-click on the drive and click on update driver software. After updating it, check if the drive starts to recognize by the system.

Final Thoughts: Drives are not supposed to stay with you for a long time, so it is always suggested to have a backup of your data. Also, to increase the chances of your storage drives’ life, you need to keep them with extra care. I hope you find this information helpful. I would appreciate it if you could share your thoughts on it or suggest some more fixes that you know and I have not included.