A Windows– based PC, for example, is generally made up of a good number of hardware components. Some more important than others, all of these are there for a reason. In this case, we want to focus on one of the most important elements in this regard, such as disk drives.
As most of you probably already know first-hand, these serve us on a PC to store both the operating system, its applications and our own data. These disk drives have grown in size, speed, and even reliability over time. But they are not infallible, something that unfortunately we have been able to verify on more than one occasion.
We already refer to internal drives of the PC such as hard drives or SSD, or external drives such as a USB memory , they can fail at any time. This is something that can become a serious problem, hence the importance of backups. At the same time, before giving the unit as such for loss, we can try to recover it in case of serious failure. It is for all this that, in the event that we have problems with a particular disk drive, this could just be a logical problem.
With this, what we want to tell you is that it is an error that can perhaps be fixed with a few commands from the operating system itself. Thus, in the event that you find yourself in an unpleasant situation like this, here we tell you how to recover it in Windows 10.
Precautions to take before using the Diskpart command
Once we know this and if we find this problem that we comment on, say that in Windows 10 if an external drive stops working, it is usually a logical failure. Here we mean a USB flash memory , SD card , etc., which suddenly stops working. Therefore, this can be due to some corruption of the data or another logical problem in it. Therefore and in order to recover it, at least as a unit, we can use the system command, Diskpart.
Of course, this command will help us to correctly erase all stored content and start from scratch with a new partition. For those of you who don’t know it, Diskpart is a command-line tool designed to manage disk drives. At the same time it is useful on partitions, volumes and virtual disks, all through the command prompt. Also at this point we will tell you that it usually works better than other Windows 10 tools such as Disk Manager or the formatting function of File Explorer.
Therefore, below we are going to help you so that you can follow the correct steps for all this. So what we do is use this command line tool, Diskpart, to clean and format a disk drive. Specifically, what we will do is fix data corruption and other problems that may have arisen here.
What we must bear in mind first of all, it is that these steps will give erase everything in the selected unit and damaged. In addition, the changes we make can no longer be undone. Therefore, if the unit is still accessible in any way, we recommend that you make a backup of the data before continuing. At the same time, if we have several units connected to the PC, we recommend disconnecting them to avoid selecting the wrong one.
How to fix a disk drive with Diskpart
To use the Diskpart command and fix the problems of the storage units in the search box we type CMD and we open the Command Prompt with administrator permissions.
Next, once we have the command prompt window on the screen, we start by typing the following command: diskpart
This launches the Windows utility as such, so then we type the following command to see all active drives: list disk. Those installed units appear with a number, so we must be clear about which one is damaged and we want to recover. Then type the following command to select the drive we want to deal with: select disk DISK_NUMBER
We have already selected the unit as such, so now we type the clean command to clean it.
Create a new partition on the recovered drive
After that, we write List disk again to make sure that the unit is still selected, so that next to it an asterisk should be seen. Confirmed this, type the following command to create a new partition: create partition primary
Once we have created the primary partition on the damaged unit, now we go with another command to select the new primary partition created: select partition 1. Also, so that it is active, once selected we type the Active command . In order to format the partition using the NTFS file system and label the drive, we type: format fs = ntfs label = LABEL_NAME quick.
Say that we have the possibility, for example, to substitute NTFS for FAT32 if we want, and specify any tag name. That name will be the one that we will see in the unit when we open it in File Explorer . To finish, the only thing left is to assign a letter and make the drive available in File Explorer. For this we only have to use the command: assign letter = UNIT_LETTER. Of course, we must make sure to assign a letter that at the moment does not have any other active drive on the PC.
To finish with all this and exit the system application, we only have to type the exit command.
In this way and after following all the steps that we have explained, you will have at your disposal a disk drive, external or internal, like the first day. Of course, the data that was stored before the catastrophe will have been lost if we did not have a previous backup of them. If we have it, it is enough that we dump them again and continue working.
