How to Format USB Drive – Fix Errors & Backup Data

The computer market is advancing at a very high speed and these days we have Portable USB Drives which can allow you to backup data upto 64Gb in a small device, hence its very each to buy a new one and store information in it. But if you want to continue using your old Memory drive to store some important information then its important to first check it out for errors and then proceed with the data transfer. A used flash drive may have a lot of issues like bad sectors, errors which would make you loose all the data which is stored in it. Hence you need to make sure that you first take a backup of all the data in it and then perform a thorough check.

Access the USB Flash drive and then copy all the information data which is stored in it to your Computer or a backup CD. Next erase whatever files are left in it by selected all the files or folders and then pressing ‘Ctrl + Del’. The main reason for performing these steps is that, flash memories are secure but cannot be completely replied upon because they are often given jerks while you move them and they are plugged and unplugged from your computer regularly, hence the data gets corrupted because of this.

You need to visit My Computer, find the Pen Drive, right click on it and select the Format Button.

Next you will get a new window which displays you different options as shown below. This would display the Capacity of the whole disk, File System, Allocation unit size, Volume Label which you can change to any Name, displayed as the drive name. Next you will find different format options like Quick Format, Create MS-Dos startup disk etc. Its recommended that you Uncheck the quick format option so that the format would take some time and perfectly complete the process.

You will next get a warning dialog box which will ask you to confirm if you would like to Format the drive. This is because sometimes by mistake you would click on the format option and in this process would loose all the data which would be hard to recover once formatted and deleted.

Once the formatting is completed, you will find a confirmation box for the same.

Next go to ‘My Computer’, right click on the Pen Drive and click on Properties option. Here under the ‘Tools’ tab you will find a option of Error-Checking which will allow you to check your drive for errors and fix the same. Click on the ‘Check Now’ button –

Here under the Check Disk option you will have to select both the displayed options which will Automatically Fix File System Errors & Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. These options are useful because you can automatically find any kind of errors which you have in your drive and even fix them.

Next you will get a report when the test is completed along with a lot of statistics on your Drive. Some amount of space in the drive would be used by itself for storing the Drive information like name, stats, configuration information which is the reason you never get 100% of the total disk space.

This complete basic process teaches you on how to backup the drives data, formatting the complete drive and then checking for errors.