Hello everybody!
Sometimes, when you try to connect a USB pen drive or an external hard disk to your computer,
the operating system warns you that it should be formatted before we can use it properly.
Let’s explore the situation when there is some data on such a disk that should be saved,
or if there no important information on the hard disk or USB drive and formatting them
is not a problem at all.
Most of the time, when you see the notification saying “You need to format the disk in drive
before you can use it” in Windows 10 and 11, it happens due to a file system error
which is caused by not removing a drive properly, interrupting a write operation, or by some
other factors.
However, you may also see this notification in various situations:
• If this USB drive or hard disk is a new one, it may come without formatting at all,
so it is your first duty to format it before using.
• If the drive you are trying to open has been previously formatted and used in Linux
or MacOS, and their file systems are not supported in Windows.
These include ext3/ext4 for Linux, and HFS (+) or APFS for Mac drives.
• If a memory card was used as internal storage on Android.
• If the disk file system is shown as RAW.
By the way, in our channel you can watch a very detailed video about RAW disks and how
to fix them.
You can find the link in the description.
All right, so you have connected your USB drive, memory card, or an external hard disk
to a desktop PC or laptop and got the error “You need to format the disk in drive before
you can use it.”
What should you do?
If this drive has no data that you need to save:
• If you encounter this error with a disk, volume or USB drive that don’t contain any
important or valuable data - or if you have copies of such important files elsewhere.
Another case is that the data on the disk is not important at all, so you can fix the
disk or USB drive just by formatting them.
You can do it in any way that you find convenient: by clicking the Format button when trying
to open a disk, or by right-clicking on it and selecting the Format option, or by using
the Disk Management tool.
When you do it, all data will be erased, but the disk will start working properly again.
If Windows doesn’t suggest formatting the disk when you try to open it, and you can’t
format it in any other way, you can fix the problem (without keeping the files) by using
the command “Clean” and the Diskpart tool.
• Right-click on the Start menu • Launch the Command Prompt as Administrator.
• Then enter the command "Diskpart" and then "list disk".
• Now we can see the list of all disks connected to this computer.
• In my case, I need to clean a USB pen drive.
Be very careful when choosing the volume for this operation.
• After that, enter “select disk” • To clean the volume, type the command
“Clean” and press Enter.
• After the process is complete, we can see a report saying that “Disk cleanup was
successful.”
• After that, type the command “create partition” to create a volume on this pen
drive.
• To choose it, type “select partition” • Now we need to format the USB pen drive
in the chosen file system (for example, NTFS).
• To do it, enter the command "format fs=ntfs quick"
• (that is, we perform quick drive format).
• Press Enter • Wait until the process is over.
• Then assign a letter for this pen drive (for example, М) with the help of this command:
“assign letter=M” • As you do that, close Diskpart with the
command “Exit” • Close the Command Prompt
• Go to the File Explorer, and now we can see that our pen drive is completely operable
now.
It’s a much nastier situation when the drive that refused to open used to hold important
data - then you have not only to format it, but also to restore the partition containing
the data.
In this case, don’t format the drive as it will just erase all the information.
Instead, do the following to have your files back:
• Launch the Command prompt as Administrator • Enter the command chkdsk required_disk_letter:
/f.
• After checking the drive, the computer will repair the damaged sectors and your NTFS
file system in this volume.
• Remember that this method is only good if the USB drive or hard disk were initially
formatted in NTFS.
• Let’s go back to that drive.
As we can see, now it works properly.
All the files it had before the failure are still there.
If the drive used to have the FAT file system, you will see this error when trying to run
the command chkdsk.
What if the command chkdsk didn’t work properly for some reason, or the RAW drive used to
have the FAT file system before?
In spite of all that, your files from such drive can still be recovered.
Because, in fact, they are not deleted yet.
It’s just a file system failure that makes them inaccessible.
So how can you do that?
• Here is the disk, and we can’t access the data inside it.
• To restore this data, run Hetman Partition Recovery
You can find a link to download this program in the description:
• Select the disk which encounters this error.
• Click on the disk and select “Full analysis.”
• After the scan is over, the program will detect
and display all partitions.
Click on the one you need, and you will see the files stored there in the window on the
right.
• If there are many files on this disk, and you need to find and recover a particular
one, click on the folder with the name Content-Aware Analysis.
Our program has sorted the files to folders by their format.
• You can use the preview window if you want.
• To restore the files, drag the necessary items to the Recovery List and click “Recovery.”
• Select the method to save the files and specify the path.
• Hit Recovery.
• And now the files have been recovered.
That is all for now.
Hit the Like button below and subscribe to our channel, if this video helped you repair
a disk or recover data from there.
Thank
you for watching.
Good luck.