Windows 10: A story of damage and recovering/reusing external USB drives

I went from a Linux Mint system which was my main computer to another OS (I won't mention the name here, but it's not Windows) and it went wrong. Luckily I had bought a Windows laptop as a back up machine. The Mint system was working fine but was a bit out of date, so I decided to use something else. I'm not sure what went wrong on the new OS, maybe it was hacked, and investigating the trashed machine is a whole project on it's own. But I ended up with various backups of the original system including some USB devices, which had been attached to the potentially compromised machine. I made the mistake of connecting one of these devices to my Windows laptop without the auto play off, so I reset the laptop to be sure and then turned off the auto play the next time around.

When I plug one USB drive in it has errors and Windows 10 fails to repair the errors. OK, most of the data appears to be readable, however it takes a very long time to read it. It's like as if the drive is maximally fragmented or something. I'm wondering if a short term solution is to try to defragment the drive, and worry about restoring the less important data later. But maybe that's quite long winded too.

Another drive appears to be trashed, it comes up as a USB device when plugged in but there's no volume in the file explorer. I would like to recover some information from it, but it's not that important as it should be on the other drive. In the second instance I'd like to reformat this drive with FAT 32, how?

What commands or utilities can help with these issues?

:)

 

Reusing an external drive

I would like to reuse an external drive (hard disk) in my PC (Win 10 Home ver. 1703) and to erase its current contents and to "format" it for this purpose. How do I do this?

 

External USB Drive Error

Hello,

I/O device error happened because your PC in not able perform an Input/ Output actions, such as reading or copying the data when you are trying to access the drive. This may occur due to different type of reasons; it may be due to damaged or defective hardware
device or your pc requires an update for issues that may conflict USB external hard drive. To isolate the reason behind and find a fix for this, we recommend that you follow the troubleshooting steps below:



Check if the problem is with the USB or with the PC.

• If you have different PC, try connecting your USB device there to see if you’ll encounter the same error or if you do not have an access to different PC, try connecting a different USB device to see if the issue persists.
  
• If you encounter the same error while connecting the USB device to a different PC or if other USB devices works on your PC without the error, this may have been that your External USB device is corrupted or damaged.
  
• In that case, you will need to reformat that USB device in order to use it again. Please do note that formatting your USB device will remove all of its contents.

If you encounter the same error when you connect a different USB device on your PC or if your USB device works fine with different PC, we recommend that you follow the troubleshooting steps in this

article to resolve the issue.



Keep us in the loop with the result.

 

Reusing an external drive

Hello,

To use your external hard drive for your Windows 10 PC again, you need to format your device to a file format your Windows 10 PC will recognize. Refer to the steps below to format your hard drive:

To format an existing partition (volume):

• Open Disk Management by pressing the Windows key + X key and select Disk Management.
• Right-click the volume that you want to format, and then select Format.
• To format the volume with the default settings, in the Format dialog box, select OK, and then select OK again.

Disclaimer: Formatting the hard drive will remove or erase all the data in that drive.

Hope it helps!