Monday, September 23, 2019

Check for bad sectors in USB thumb drive and fix it with AOMEI Partition Assistant

I have a USB thumb drive which I suspect it is having bad sectors because accessing certain files in it will prompt out read error.

MS Windows has a disk error checking tool which you can access by right-click on the drive in Windows Explorer, and go to Properties > Tools > Error checking then click on the Check button. However, it reported no error found. Using the chkdsk command at command prompt produced the same result: no error found.

Is it really no error found? Or the tool that comes with MS Windows just unable to detect the error?

I found out the bad sectors when I checked the USB thumb drive with AOMEI Partition Assistant. Therefore, the answer is clear: MS Windows Error Checking or chkdsk just unable to detect the bad sectors!


To check for the bad sectors, execute AOMEI Partition Assistant, right click on the disk you want to check, select Advanced and then Check Partition.

After that, select "Check whether there is bad sector on the partition" and click the OK button.


This function just helps you discover if there is any bad sector, but it won't help you to fix the bad sector(s) found.

This is how I repaired the bad sectors in my USB thumb drive: copy all the files from the USB thumb drive to a folder in my hard disk. There are certain files unable to be copied due to the bad sectors problem, and need to be replaced by backup copy.

After that, reformat the USB thumb drive. Do not use the "quick format" option, make sure it is a full format. I reformatted my USB thumb drive using AOMEI Partition Assistant too.

Then, check for bad sectors using the steps above again to the reformatted USB thumb drive. If the bad sectors can be recovered, they will become usable sectors again.

Finally, copy or move back all the files from hard disk to the USB thumb drive. Run another bad sector check, and my USB thumb drive is fully recovered now!

Click here to download the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition software for free. It is free for both personal and commercial use.

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