How to restore a file from formatted USB drive

You have formatted your USB drive wrongly or it failed to work due virus attack or for some reason it becomes in accessible displaying RAW file format, where in this case the common option is to format it, but sadly you will lose all your files in it.

When you are in this situation the one option you have is to try to restore your file from this formatted USB as soon as possible, actually, formatting a USB flash drive does not completely delete all USB drive data. Just only mark all the files invisible, making room for initial use. Data in a formatted disk may be recoverable, provided we use the right tools.

To increase your chance of successful recovery, it is advisable not to use the USB until you get back your data.

To Unformat USB drive or any other non-removable drive from which you want to restore lost data  , you need to use third party data recovery tools , there are too many tools for this purpose , here I recommend you to try iCare Data Recovery Free  and Power data recovery

Download and install one of the two tools above, let me show you how to recover using power data recovery,

 

 

Power recovery has different options such as Undelete recovery, advanced recovery and Deep Scan Recovery. 

Undelete recovery will used for recovering a file accidentally deleted from Recycle bin or restores files deleted 

using shift + delete option.

You can use Advanced Recovery for formatted drives, damaged partitions, in accessible or lost partitions

The last option which is Deep scan recovery will give you a chance to recovery files in more complex situations.

For our case let us use advanced recovery, click on it and select the drive you want to restore data from

Select the drive and click on full scan

As you can see here, it started scanning the drive, wait until if finishes, depending on the size of USB and 

the files in it will take from few minutes to hours

 

Once the scan has completed, select the partition you want and click show files, partitions with highest suggestion rate 

are recommended to check first 

Yeah, we get it, as you can see below, some found files are listed, and check the box and click on 

save files to restore your lost files

 

After you select the file to restore, it is better not to save to the same drive because it might overwrite other lost files

 

 

How to create bootable USB drive without any Software – Using windows CMD

 

Sometimes we need to start our computer from pen drive or a USB drive especially in the following situations, we need to boot from OS:- 

• When we have a problem to boot from OS or an OS crashes.
•   Our computer/laptop CD/DVD driver is not working
•   Our Laptop does not have CD/DVD driver

Therefore, if you can boot your computer from CD/DVD due to any of the above issues, you have to try booting from USB drive. 

To boot from USB Drive, first you need to make it bootable, there are different third party software’s to make your Pen-drive bootable,

for example: Rufus, PowerISO etc.

In this blog, I will show you how to do it without any third party software, just using windows CMD, follow the following steps:

1^st: Open/start CMD using admin privilege, using one of the following methods:

  Type cmd on search box , right click and select run as admin

       

         You can also use task manager to open new cmd task  as admin , right click on a task bar to open task manager  , then click on file and select create new task

 

If you are successful in either ways, you will see the below screen, this indicates CMD is running in admin mode.

2^nd step:

      

 On this step, connect your USB drive to your computer   and on the CMD window you opened with admin, type diskpart (no space) and press enter

3^rd step:-

   Type list disk in the diskpart prompt and press enter, this will list all physical storage device on your computer

   

    4^th Step:

 Select your USB drive you want to make bootable, to do that type select disk 1 (here it  is disk 1, it might be different on yours)

            

5^th step:

Type clean, this removes all partition and volume information from the USB drive and also removes the data.

        

6^th Step:

On this step, we need to create a partition on the USB drive, to do so, type create partition primary

On this step, you need to first list disk and select the disk again

           

7^th step: select partition one, type select partition 1

           

8^th step: now we will format the usb using ntfs, to do this, type format=fs, ntfs quick , this will format the usb faster (quick) , if you omit the quick , it may take long time.

         

Finally, mark your primary partition as active, type active

        

Type Exit to exit from disk part 

Done! Now simply copy your OS installation file to this USB and check it.

N.B. you should extract the installation file, zipped file will not boot

    

           Also make sure you copy the internal files and folders, do not copy them all in one folder (send only the contents of the parent folder , excluding the parent folder)

         

    One final tip , you can still use your USB to handle your files as usual

You can also check the video here: