How to Fix Corrupted Drives

Why Your Device is Corrupted

Storage devices are corrupted when the file system is damaged. These are some things that could cause a storage device to be corrupted:

• A write operation to the device was interrupted without warning (e.g. by unplugging it).
• The device is infected with malware.
• The device is physically damaged.

By the way, I also have this post on corrupting images!

What it Looks Like

There are a few ways you might know that your storage is corrupted:

• The drive isn’t recognized.

• Files stored on the drive won’t open.
• The files do open, but the files appear corrupted.

How to Fix It

There are two ways that I know of to fix corrupted drives. This post covers both.

1. R-Undelete

R-Undelete is a very useful and user-friendly file recovery program that can sometimes find your corrupted files.

1. Locate the drive you want to search.
2. Browse to the file that you want to recover and select it with the checkbox.
3. Click “Recover x files”.

2. Windows Disk Management

Disclaimer

WARNING: This fix won’t recover your data; it just wipes the whole drive and creates a new partition to store data on (although you might be able to use the first method to recover any lost files). But at least you still get a working storage device!

1. First, right-click on the Windows Start icon and select “Disk Management”. (Make sure you do this as an administrator or it won’t work.)

2. Find the corrupted drive.

3. Right-click the bar and select “New Simple Volume”.
4. Click Next until you get to the “Assign Drive Letter or Path” screen. You can select any letter you want.
5. On the screen after that, change the file system to FAT32, the standard for removable storage. You can also use the Volume Label option to name the drive whatever you want.
6. Click Finish on the next screen to start the repair process.
7. It’ll take a minute or two, but a File Explorer window will open soon. Your drive is fixed!