How To Fix USB Drive Not Formatted Error On Windows 10

OSer

1 year ago

Summary: When you plug a USB drive into your computer, you might get an error message saying The USB Drive is Not Formatted and many users will click the Format button to format the USB drive. In fact, before clicking the Format button, you have some methods to repair your USB drive and recover the data from the USB drive. In this article, we will show you some methods to fix the USB Drive Not Formatted error without data loss on Windows 10.

Overview USB Drive Not Formatted

The USB Drive Not Formatted error appears in Windows PC when you connect an external USB drive with a damaged or unrecognized file system. And there are several reasons that can cause A USB drive damaged or corrupt:

Bad sectors
Corrupted file system
Improper removal and installation of the USB drive
Physical abuse
Sudden power failure during data writing, editing, or reading.

Besides, Windows supports NTFS, FAT (FAT 16/32), exFAT, and ReFS formatted storage media. Any storage media or partition formatted with an unsupported file system is recognized as a RAW or corrupt drive.

After trying several methods, I found these methods below to be very effective to resolve the USB Drive Not Formatted error. So, when you also come across the USB Drive Not Formatted error, just try them once and see the results.

Recover Data From Not Formatted USB Drive

The following methods involve formatting the USB drive, and the result is that you will lose all the data in the USB drive.

So the first and urgent task you need to do is to recover the data from the not-formatted USB drive with Bitwar Data Recovery Software, which is a professional data recovery tool supporting almost all formats in Windows and Mac. You can learn about this software through the following features:

Any of the recognized data types are all supported, including documents, photos, video, audio, email and so on.
This software recovers 580+ deleted, formatted, lost and disappeared data from internal & external hard drives, SD memory cards, USB flash drives, or other digital storage media on Windows or Mac.
Allows users to preview scanned files and selectively restore desired files.
The streamlined data recovery process with great built-in navigation makes it easy for individuals to use.

Now, let’s see how Bitwar Data Recovery Software works to recover data from not-formatted USB drive:

Go to Bitwarsoft Download Center, find and install Bitwar Data Recovery on the computer.
Select the USB drive from the Partitions or Devices list.
Choose the Quick Scan mode. If the deleted data can’t be found, you can choose the Deep Scan mode. It performs an in-depth search to look for data in every corner of your computer. After that, click on the Next button.
Choose your target file types, and click Scan.
Choose, preview the scanned files, then click Recover and save the files into different devices or partitions.

NOTE: Remember to save all the deleted photos to a different file location to prevent data from being overwritten!

Methods to Fix USB Drive Not Formatted

After using Bitwar Data Recovery Software to back up and recover your data from the USB drive, now you can take the following methods to fix the USB drive not formatted error.

Method 1: Run CHKDSK Scan

CHKDSK is a special command-line utility that actually helps to fix USB drive errors by repairing system file errors. Also, it marks the bad sectors on the USB drive so that one can prevent their OS from storing the file on such bad sectors. To run the CHKDSK command, follow the steps below:

Press Win + S and type cmd there.
Next, you have to right-click Run as administrator to open Command Prompt.
In the popping-up window, type the command: Chkdsk X: /r /f and press the Enter key. Here, X denotes the USB drive letter.
The scanning process may take a while depending on the USB size. After the scanning is finished, you need to unplug and reconnect the USB flash drive.
Now, you have to open the File Explorer and try to access it.

Method 2: Disk Management

Another method that you can try to resolve the USB drive not formatted error is converting the RAW to NTFS file system using Disk Management Tool. To do this, follow the steps below:

Press Win + X and choose Disk Management.
Choose the USB drive from the right panel.
Right-click the device and select Properties
Now, click on the Security tab then Advanced > Owner > Change.
After that, in the Select User or Group window, tap the Advanced option.
After clicking the Find Now option, select the first listed user and click OK.

Method 3: Windows File Explorer

Go to your File Explorer on your PC.
Right-click the USB drive and choose to format.
Set the proper volume label, file system, and allocation unit size.
Click Start and wait patiently for the process to complete.

Method 4:Diskpart

Diskpart is the best built-in tool to format any external device on the Windows operating system. Before you format the USB drive, make sure you backup your data first or you can recover the data with the help of data recovery software after fixing the issue.

Press Win + R and type cmd in the Run window.
Type Diskpart > list disk > select disk * (Replace * with your disk number) > format fs=ntfs quick.
Press Enter and wait patiently for the process to complete.

Conclusion

The USB Drive is Not Formatted error is not a knotty problem, the key point is to backup your data before operating the above methods or recover data from the USB drive after format using Bitwar Data Recovery Software.