My USB drive has been working well with no obvious hardware issues. I had to reformat/reinstall my O/S for a malware issue. When I tried to connect the USB drive, I got the "new device found" message and the drive appeared in device manager, but it did not generate a drive letter, so it was not accessible via Windows Explorer.

I went to device/hardware/disk/manage and was able to assign a drive letter, but now the drive is considered "raw" and I'm prompted to format it.

I'm hoping this a relatively easy fix instead of a full blown data recovery, but I'm clueless as to what to do. Luckily I have no critical files on the drive, but a ton of files I'd like to avoid losing.

Thanks,

Bob D.

Did you try any recovery software?

You may get files without folder structure and file names.

Hi,you might try "get data back" or simular recovery prog.

Regards, Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

I would first examine the MBR and boot sector. These are the easiest to repair.

To this end, could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

The MBR got corrupted and thus, you are unable to access your partitions.

I would advice to not to perform partition creating or formatting operations until you get your data back. At this point, it may be relatively possible to restore your data.

What's the capacity of the drive?

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Bitlevel Data Recovery

Capacity is 500 GB