Recover data from formatted or corrupted pendrive

TestDisk is a free open source software which helpsrecovering data from a corrupt usb flash drive. Recently my flash drive got corrupted, and was asking to be formatted under windows once plugged in. I tried opening the pen drive under several operating systems including windows xp, vista,windows 7, fedora, ubuntu etc. But in most of them, “Insert a Disk into drive x”  and “Drive is not formatted” error was popping up.

TestDisk Features

• Fix partition table and recover lost/deleted partition
• Rebuild/Recover FAT32 boot sector
• Fix FAT Tables
• Rebuild/Recover NTFS boot sector
• Undelete files from fat, ntfs and ext2 filesystem
• Copy files from deleted partitions
• Supported Operating systems: DOS, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Linux, MacOS X etc

How to use

Common symptoms or errors seen when a drive gets corrupted is, Windows Explorer shows primary partition as raw or unformatted and Windows prompts this error message. “The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?”

To recover a partition or repair a file system, you must run TestDisk with full administrator privileges. In Windows Vista, right click Testdisk.exe and select “run as administrator” option.

To recover partition from a media image or repair a filesystem image, run

• testdisk image.dd to create a raw disk image
• testdisk image.E01 to recover files from an Encase EWF image
• testdisk 'image.*' if the Encase image is split into several files.

Download TestDisk – Windows or go to Official download page