Plugging a USB drive into a USB port made it erase..?

[Genesis4455]

Today my friends little brother plugged my usb drive with important school papers into a messed up port and when I plut the usb into another port it says you need to format the drive when i go to computer>mange>disk management it says RAW is there any way I can recover the files without formatting or something please someone help =]

 

[merkat106]

A little program I know might be able to fix the file system (as long as you do not use chkdsk first)...
Testdisk: TestDisk - CGSecurity

http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.11.3.win.zip

 

[Genesis4455]

Do I need to format the USB drive first cause its not detecting it but i have it plugged in and its detecting it.

 

[merkat106]

No

Do not format the drive
Just plug in the usb device, launch testdisk, follow the prompts...
TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity

 

[Night Hawk]

The problem is more likely due to not using the "safely remove" option to eject the flash drive before unplugging it. Have you restarted the system at all since the flash drive was plugged in?

Try restarting the system by first right clicking to remove to unplug the drive and following the restart plug it in and then go to the DM to give it a new drive letter. The files would still be intact but likely it still has a Fat 32 factory format seen. Assigning it a new letter however may initialize the drive for you right away making it available for use.

Windows when not recognising the existing Fat volume on a drive from improper removal will often prompt for a reformat to the native NTFS.

 

[Genesis4455]

It reverted back to RAW

 

[Night Hawk]

It that happened the drive is likely no good. If you can plug it in on another machine you may filnd it works ok there where you can at least recovery files from it.

Once you have them backed up you simply reformat it to NTFS or better use DiskPart to clean off the factory Fat 32 volume and add a fresh NTFS one. That will show if the drive itself works ok.