How to Recover Data from USB Suddenly Unallocated

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Jaden· Answered on Mar 21, 2024

Your partition table, which defined the USB partition, was probably lost or corrupted. More than likely, all that is required is for the program to restore the partition table from the remaining information it finds on the drive. Everything should magically reappear - assuming nothing was written to the drive before. Since it is still unallocated, nothing was probably written to it.

Because your USB is unallocated, it has a better chance of recovering completely because the recovery program will restore the partition table without changing it, making the existing file system table for that partition accessible again.

If you simply "re-initialized" the drive by rebuilding the partition table, the existing file system table for that partition would be erased, and data loss would commence as the disk was written to. In that situation, the recovery tool would have to go through the old files and start piecing together what it could locate, and the odds of recovery would be substantially lower.

Thus, you can use Command Prompt, a useful Windows built-in program that allows users to take complete control of their computer, which could help you recover files that have been hidden, accidentally deleted, corrupted, or infected with a virus. CMD can recover deleted or corrupted files from a computer hard disk, USB flash drive, pen drive, memory card, or other external hard drives.

• Connect your computer to your hard disk, memory card, or USB device.
• Open the Start menu, type "cmd" into the search field, then press Enter. Then look for something called "cmd. exe" in the list of programs.
• Right-click "cmd. exe" to open the command window to recover virus-infected files.
• Enter "attrib -h -r -s drive letter:*.* /s /d," for example, "attrib -h -r -s G:*.* /s /d". Instead of G, enter the drive letter of the hard drive or external storage device from which you lost files.

Note that if you format the USB during the CMD procedure, always remember to apply a reliable file recovery software like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for help.