Just relax! Here are three things you can do when you face pen drive, USB or SD card corruption. These little tricks are easy to perform but powerful enough to resolve common malfunction symptoms. We will see the methods to repair a damaged flash drive and the best programs that you can use to repair it.
Although USB flash drives and SD cards have developed as popular storage media, they are prone to damage. When they get damaged or corrupted, any of the following issues will appear:
- Error message saying “Cannot access SD card. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
- When you try to read the drive, no data appears along with an error message “SD card read/write error” which means you cannot read data from this device.
- The Windows computer recognized your SD card correctly, but you can’t see any data inside it, and the hard drive says it needs to be formatted.
- You can see the contents of your SD card on your system, but you cannot add, delete, modify or copy data on your SD card because it is set to read-only mode.
- The SD card / pen drive becomes a RAW file system and does not allow you to access it.
Before discussing how to fix corrupted pen drive or SD card in Windows 10/8/7, you may want to know what causes its damage.
- Physical damages. The SD card or pen drive is quite small and vulnerable to physical damage.
- File system corruption. The operating system influences the SD card or pen drive. When the operating system is not working properly, it will damage the file system and eventually the SD card/pen drive will be damaged.
- Increase in bad sectors. Bad sector is the defective storage space that can no longer save data. Sometimes more bad sectors will be generated on SD card/pen drive. Finally, they will not be able to work normally.
- Insert or remove SD card/pen drive incorrectly. If you violently and frequently plug and unplug the SD card or pen drive on many different platforms, it is more likely to be damaged.
- Virus or malware infection. If you download any malware on your computer accidentally, you will get your data stored on SD card/pen drive. In such a case, the data will be unreadable and the hard drive will also be prone to be inaccessible.
- Interruptions in formatting SD card/pen drive. If the formatting process is interrupted by power outage, abrupt removal, or other accidents, the device is likely to be damaged as well.
You should unplug your USB stick from the current USB port and try plugging it into a different port on the computer. This will fail if the USB port is faulty, damaged, or dead; your USB drive still cannot be recognized. Then you need to connect the USB stick to a different computer and see if it can be detected or not.
Unplugging the computer is a simple solution to remove the power supply from both the computer and the motherboard. When the motherboard is powered off, all hardware (including USB ports) connected to the computer will be cut off. You need to wait a few minutes to re-plug the power supply; then the USB ports will reboot and the drivers will be reloaded, so your USB flash drive can be recognized.
The first thing you need to do is to get MiniTool Power Data Recovery, a reliable data recovery software, and install it properly on your working computer.