How to repair a USB pendrive with Diskpart (or a memory card)

USB flash drives and memory cards are very useful elements since they allow you to carry a lot of information in little space. In addition, they can be easily transported since they are resistant to the lack of moving parts. Even so, these units can be damaged, both physically and at the software level. Here we will explain how to repair a pendrive with software problems using Diskpart.

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What is Diskpart

It is a tool that is executed by means of commands that allows us fully manage our hard drives. We could use many different tools with graphical environment on Windows, but Diskpart is more powerful and offers us more options. Something very interesting to keep in mind is that this tool It exists from Windows XP to Windows 10. Its use is simple and can be used both through 'Symbol of the system'as with'Windows PowerShell'.

One of Diskpart's strengths is that You can see hard drives that the Windows GUI does not display. In addition, this function allows you to create or delete partitions, change the size of partitions, format hard drives, etc. In addition, it has the ability to show failed hard drives or RAW drives, allowing an attempt to recover them.

Diskpart is characterized by be available on DVD and USB installation of the operating system. This also allows it to be used via Command Prompt within recovery mode. As we can see, it is a tool that is important to know.

How to use Diskpart and start using it

Accessing this tool is relatively straightforward, as it can be accessed via Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell. We must bear in mind that for how to use Diskpart we need administrator permissions. We go with the steps to use the tool.

• How to use Diskpart using PowerShell: We click the right button on the start menu and a series of options will appear. We can find the option 'Windows PowerShell (Administrator)', which is the one that interests us.

• How to use Diskpart via Command Prompt: We can access it through the conventional Windows command terminal. It is as simple as opening the start menu and typing 'CMD' (or using the search engine on the Windows 10 taskbar). Once it appears, right click and this is important: 'Run as administrator'

Most common problems in USB flash drives

We are going to review the most common mistakes that portable storage drives and memory cards can make.

Virtual disk service error

1. There is no media on the device: This failure tells us that the equipment cannot communicate with the USB memory. Our computer recognizes it as an empty drive, not being able to access the stored data
2. Operation timed out: Indicates that the computer has infected connect to the drive but there is no response
3. The request cannot be made due to an I / O device error: There is a communication error between the unit and our team
4. Device is not available: Windows is unable to communicate with the storage drive

The four errors described here are quite common on USB sticks and memory cards. If you have one of these errors, we have to say that unfortunately the unit has a hardware problem. In this case, recovering the information will not be viable unless we physically repair it and the problem is not the memory chip itself.

Virtual disk service error: The media is write protected

If this error appears, the memory unit only has reading awards. Formerly the pendrive had a small lever to prevent reading and writing, but this no longer exists. The process of how to repair a pendrive with this problem is quite simple.

The first thing is to right click on the Windows icon located at the bottom left. We run Windows PowerShell as System Administrator. Then we enter these commands:

We start Diskpart

diskpart

View the list of units

list disk

We select the unit with problems

select disk 

View the list of drives (the selected drive appears with an asterisk (*) before the volume)

list disk

We remove the read-only option

attributes disk clear readonly

Virtual disk service error: volume is too small

It may be that the storage unit is in FAT32, which limits the size of the file. If this appears to us indisputably we have the unit in a format that does not serve us. We are going to see how to repair this pendrive in a simple way.

We start Diskpart

diskpart

View the list of units

list disk

We select the unit with problems

select disk 

View the list of drives (the selected drive appears with an asterisk (*) before the volume)

list disk

We clean the unit

clean

We assign NTFS format

format fs = NTFS quick

Now we can use the memory without major problems

The volume is too large

This bug appears in Windows because the FAT32 format has a maximum drive size of 32GB. So any USB drive greater than this capacity must be formatted in NTFS, which is the most common format.

Drive repair using Diskpart

When the unit does not have physical problems but problems, it is best to clean it. If we have data on the drive that can be valuable it can be a problem, since the correction is to erase everything. It is important to have backup copies of all files. If this is your first time listening to it, we are sorry, but it is a valuable experience. You can try going through different file recovery tools before using this method, see if you can save anything.

The first thing is to right click on the Windows icon located at the bottom left. We run Windows PowerShell as System Administrator. The process of how to repair the pendrive is as follows:

We start Diskpart

diskpart

View the list of units

list disk

We select the unit with problems

select disk 

View the list of drives (the selected drive appears with an asterisk (*) before the volume)

list disk

We clean the unit

clean

We create a primary partition

create partition primary

List of partitions available on the drive

list partition 

We select the partition

select partition 

Partition activation

active

We assign NTFS format

format fs = NTFS label = ""quick

Videotutorial

Conclusion

This is how we can repair a USB pendrive (learn more about the types of USB ports) or memory card, yes, as long as they are software problems. If they are problems at the hardware level, things will be more difficult, because we will have to disassemble the unit. If it is by software, you just have to follow the steps little by little and make sure what we are doing.