Sometimes when a USB drive is connected to a computer, the operating system displays a message that errors have been found on the drive. This means that bad sectors have appeared on the flash drive. The Windows operating system has built-in tools for this kind of media repair.
Instructions
Step 1
Start the Computer Management utility. To do this, right-click on the "My Computer" icon and select "Manage". Find "Disk Management" in the list of sections of this utility and click on this item with the mouse. Wait for the utility to load data for all media on the system. Find the section related to the USB stick and select it with the mouse. Right-click on the section and then click on "Properties" (second from the bottom).
Step 2
In the media properties window, open the Tools tab, where the media maintenance utility operations are available. Click on the "Run scan" button, and in the scan window, check the box next to the "Scan and repair bad sectors" item. Click on "Run" to start the verification and recovery procedure. Depending on the size of the flash drive and the number of files, the procedure will take from several minutes to an hour. Wait for the system message that the check was completed successfully and some errors were fixed.
Step 3
Full formatting of the media also helps with sector recovery. This can be done in the same way from the "Disk Management", this time by selecting the "Format" section in the menu. Or start the formatting process from the command line using the format command. As a rule, USB drives break down when not working properly with a personal computer. This often happens when the device is not properly removed from the system. If you want to remove the device, click on the Safely Remove icon in the computer tray and select the device. Then click on the "Stop" button. After that, you can remove the USB drive from the com port.
