How to Recover Data From a Formatted USB Drive

Did you accidentally format your USB drive? Or maybe you meant to, but then realized there were important work documents or personal files on it? Happens to the best of us. The good news? Recovery is often possible and we’ll show you exactly how to recover files and folders lost due to formatting a USB drive. Let’s do this!

What Happens to a USB Drive When it is Formatted?

When you format a USB drive—or any drive—your operating system installs a filesystem on it so it can store and organize data properly. Sometimes, formatting is necessary to make a drive usable, especially if it’s new, incompatible with the current setup, or has become corrupted and the system prompts you to format it. Windows offers a Quick format and a normal (full) format, and they handle your data very differently.

A Quick format simply creates a new filesystem, such as exFAT or NTFS, and prepares the drive for new data. It doesn’t erase the old data; it only removes the pointers that tell the operating system where the files are located. A Full format is a different beast. It doesn’t just prepare the drive for new data—it actively overwrites every sector with patterns like zeros or other predefined data. This process effectively destroys all existing data, which makes recovery virtually impossible (it also checks the drive for bad sectors to make sure it’s in good shape).

A Full Format can be called a non-Quick Format because, on Windows, it is activated when you leave the “Quick Format” checkbox unchecked during the formatting process, as shown in the screenshot.

If you formatted your SD card using the device it was used with (a camera, smartphone, or gaming console) rather than a computer, in most cases, it performed a Quick Format.

So, if you’ve used a Full format and don’t have any backups for the data on your USB drive, regrettably, you won’t be able to retrieve your files.

Guide to different formatting options:

There’s also another type of formatting called low-level formatting, which you can do with third-party tools. For the data, it’s even more destructive than Full formatting, so if you’ve used low-level formatting on your USB drive, unfortunately, no recovery tool will be able to bring your files back.

How to Recover Data From a Formatted USB Drive

If you are in the habit of regularly backing up the data on your USB drive, you may be able to use the backup media to recover the information if you have inadvertently formatted it. While it’s always best practice to keep backups of all your data, many users only back up their main hard drives or specific folders and files—and even then, only 33% of those who back up do so regularly, as our data backup survey shows. So, what can you do if you’ve formatted a USB drive and don’t have any backups? The only real option left is data recovery software. These tools can be used to essentially unformat a USB drive. While from a strictly technical perspective, it is impossible to reverse the formatting process, you can undo most of the damage done to the data that resided on the drive before the process was performed.

Here’s how to use Disk Drill to recover data from a formatted flash drive:

1. Download and install Disk Drill data recovery software on your computer’s main disk. Windows may show a prompt asking if you want to allow the app to make changes to your device. Click Yes. That permission is required for the software to access drives.
2. Connect the formatted flash drive to your computer, then open Disk Drill. Once connected, Disk Drill should automatically detect it.
3. Select your formatted flash drive from the app’s list of available disks.
4. Click the Search for lost data button. When the app asks which scan method you want to run, choose Universal Scan. It is the best option when you’re trying to recover data from a formatted USB.
5. As the scan runs, Disk Drill organizes recoverable files into categories such as Pictures, Videos, Audio, Documents, Archives, and Other Files. Once the scan is finished, you can simply click the Recover All button to retrieve everything in one go. Or you can start reviewing files as they’re discovered. Click on a category, like Audio, to see what’s already been found, or select Review Found Items to browse through all the files detected so far. This way, you can quickly locate specific files without waiting for the entire scan to complete.
6. When you click on individual files, a small preview will appear on the right side of the interface. Disk Drill can display previews for all file types (as long as they’re natively supported by your OS or through third-party apps installed on your computer). Each file also comes with a Recovery Chances rating, which shows how likely the file is to be restored successfully. This rating will be displayed as High, Average, or Low. But here’s the simpler rule: If a file opens cleanly, it survived formatting intact and should recover without issues.
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   Disk Drill provides a variety of filtering options to help you quickly locate specific files. You can filter files by date modified, type, size, or recovery chances. On the left pane, you can narrow down results further by specific file types—not just broad categories like Pictures or Audio, but exact formats such as JPG or MP3. There’s also a search bar that lets you find files by their names (if preserved) or extensions.

7. Once you’ve checked all the files or folders you want to recover, click the Recover button at the bottom of the screen. Make sure you don’t choose the same USB drive as the destination. Overwriting the drive could jeopardize any remaining files that haven’t been recovered yet—and we definitely don’t want that, do we? Choose a different storage location, such as your computer’s hard drive or another external drive. Now, all you need to do is wait for the recovery process to complete. Once it’s done, simply click on Show recovered data in Explorer to access your restored files.

As we mentioned earlier, Disk Drill is a capable data recovery tool for cases of formatting, as it has good support for common file systems used on USB drives, such as FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS. And if the file system is too damaged to be of use, it can fall back on its signature scan, which identifies files by type—like common image, audio, video, document files—as well as more specialized file types like like RAF or ARW.

If Disk Drill doesn’t sound like the right fit for you, we’ve compiled a list of highly capable Disk Drill alternatives that might better suit your needs. Be sure to check it out.

Can I Recover Data from a Formatted USB Drive Using CMD?

Although some sites might suggest using the command line to recover files from a formatted USB drive, this advice is pretty misleading (or even very misleading). The Command Prompt (CMD) in Windows doesn’t have tools designed for actual file recovery (unless we count third-party CLI tools like PhotoRec or even Microsoft’s own WFR). Instead, commands like CHKDSK are often recommended, but they only repair file system issues or fix logical errors—they won’t retrieve deleted or lost files.

In some rare cases, CMD might help if the drive’s file system is corrupted and the data is still intact, but it won’t reverse the effects of formatting. For true formatted pen drive data recovery a dedicated tool is the way to go. The one that’s specifically built to handle formatted drives and locate recoverable files.

You can’t rely on CMD in this situation, it isn’t just ineffective—it could even make things worse. For example, if you run CHKDSK on a damaged USB drive, it may mark certain sectors as bad if it finds issues with them. Once marked, Windows will treat those sectors as unusable and won’t try to store or read data from them. If your files are stored in these marked sectors, they could be permanently lost.

Despite what we said earlier, we get why CMD/CHKDSK sometimes pops up when people talk about recovering formatted USB drives. We think it’s because a small percentage of users searching for “recover formatted USB” aren’t dealing with a fully completed format—something went wrong during the process.

If formatting failed or was interrupted, the drive might become corrupted. If that’s your case, then yes, the CHKDSK command in CMD can help. Here’s what you can do:

1. Open a command prompt and type cmd in the Windows search box.
2. Select Run as administrator.
3. Type this command: chkdsk G: /f/x/r. Replace G with the drive letter of the formatted USB drive.
4. Hit Enter and let the process complete.

Final Words

Formatting a USB drive is not final most of the time. It often isn’t (at least after a Quick Format). Your best move is simple: stop using the drive, run a proper recovery scan, and save recovered files to a different disk. If you get clean previews, that’s a strong sign your files survived and recovery will go smoothly.

If you used a Full format (or a low-level format), set expectations lower – the data has already been overwritten, and software won’t have anything meaningful left to pull back. At that point, your only realistic “recovery” path is backups (if you had any in place before formatting).

If you encounter roadblocks during your recovery attempts, don’t give up. There are plenty of online communities where you can ask for troubleshooting advice and tips. For instance, the r/techsupport subreddit, with over 2 million members, is a great place to seek help for general tech issues. For more targeted guidance, communities like r/DataRecoveryHelp specialize in data recovery and can provide valuable help.

You can also join our own Handy Recovery Advisor Community, where users share experiences and solutions. For example, one user recently sought advice on recovering music files from a flash drive, while another faced an issue where their USB drive, after being safely ejected from one PC, became inaccessible on another.

When you start a discussion in one of these communities, don’t forget to include as much information as possible. Share what steps you’ve already tried, any errors you encountered, and which tools you’ve used so far. Screenshots of error messages or anything unusual can also help others pinpoint the problem faster. The more clear and detailed you are, the easier it’ll be for people to give you advice that works.

FAQ