How to restore a USB flash drive at home? Practical advice and recommendations

In our age of information technology, virtually every personal computer user has different portable technology. MP3 players, DVRs, mobile phones and cameras - all these and dozens of other portable devices are equipped with flash cards, which store a huge amount of different data.

Despite the fact that this information is sometimes very valuable, it is not always possible to copy it to the computer on time. A flash drive of a favorite device may fail, refusing to work at the most inopportune moment. And what if the favorite photos, a quarterly report or other, very important and expensive information are recorded on the carrier? Let's look at options for how to restore a USB flash drive with all the data recorded on it.

If your drive is not "dead", and with it you accidentally deleted important information by mistake, do not despair. Recovering deleted data from a flash drive is possible, and the chances that this operation will be successful are quite large. But sometimes it happens that the memory card or flash drive refuses to work, and throw it out for some reason is a pity. Let's consider what can be done with such carriers in both cases and how to restore the USB flash drive with or without information.

First of all, let's consider ways to "save" a removable media along with the data that was recorded on it. Restoring them is best done with the help of special utilities. Ideally for these purposes, a free program called "PhotoRec" is suitable. It not only restores all data from removable media to the specified folder on your computer, but also breathes a new life into the flash drive, forcing it to work for a very long time.

An alternative to the utility described above can be the paid program "R-Studio". And the convenience of these programs is that they are able to recover information from the media not only before flashing, but after. Although flashing flash drives is only for users who are confident in their abilities. Or, to begin with, you can practice on very old removable media of scanty volume, so that in the event of their final and irrevocable death, there was nothing to regret.

The flashing itself (updating the flash drive's boot information) can help if the removable media does not want to be formatted or not detected at all when it's connected to the computer. This is almost always due to software failure of the controller, which is eliminated if the flash drive is flashed. First, we define the controller type of our mount device using the program "CheckUDisk" (an alternative to this utility can be "USBDeview", "ChipGenius" or "UsbIDCheck") and learn how to reflash our media according to the type of controller now known. For this we apply for help to the site flashboot.ru and find the corresponding controller of our idle flash drive line. On the contrary, we look at the "Utility" column and reflash with it our carrier. How to restore a USB flash drive using this program, you can find out from the detailed instructions on the same site or following the plan below.

1. Disconnect the USB flash drive from the computer and install the utility.

2. Run the program, then automatically installs the driver it needs.

3. We connect the USB flash drive to the computer, followed by a request to install the driver and to it. Choose an automatic installation.

4. Press the "Enum" button (or the "F3" key) in the program, and our newly unplugged flash drive is again detected on the port.

5. Press the "Start" button (or the "space" key) and watch the process of formatting our device.

6. After that, disconnect the removable media, close and uninstall the program, and reconnect our device.

7. We make formatting with the help of "Windows" and are glad that now we know how to restore the flash drive at home.

If at some point removable media is not detected, try to connect it to another USB port, most often it helps. It should be noted that, unfortunately, the recovery of data flash drives is not always possible. The methods of "resurrection" described above, as a rule, help in nine cases out of ten.