USB shows 'the volume does not contain a recognized file system' error

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Recently I bought a SanDisk USB from Best Buy to make a Windows bootable drive, and it worked fine at first. But recently, whenever I plug it in, I get this message: “The volume does not contain a recognized file system.” I’m not sure what happened. Is it broken, or could it be infected by a virus? Has anyone seen this before or knows how I can fix it safely? Thanks for your help.

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@Davidddddd

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Since you used it as a bootable Windows installer, the drive was likely formatted in a way Windows treats differently (like NTFS or a special bootable format). Over time, if it wasn’t safely ejected or got interrupted during writes, the file system can get “corrupted.” The simplest fix is to back up any data (if accessible via another tool or OS) and reformat the USB in Windows as exFAT or NTFS. You can do this by right-clicking the drive in File Explorer then Format. No need to panic about viruses this is a very common behavior for bootable drives. After reformatting, it should work normally.

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Hey, “The Volume Does Not Contain a Recognized File System" is a common prob. The file system on your USB is likely corrupted. Don’t worry, it’s probably not broken or a virus. If possible, back up any files on another computer, then use Windows Disk Management to reformat the drive to NTFS or FAT32. Good luck

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Does the issue persist if you update the USB driver? If so, you may try the following steps:

  1. Run the SFC (System File Checker) Command to scan for and repair corrupted, missing, or misbehaving Windows system files.
  2. Use the built-in tool in Windows to fix your USB drive:

repair
repair471×638 110 KB

  1. Run the CHKDSK command to scan and fix the file system errors on your USB drive.

Related: Fix The Volume Does Not Contain A Recognized File System in Windows

If none of the steps can solve your issue, use data recovery to get back important files from your USB drive and then reformat it.

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Perform a low-level format using SD Memory Card Formatter, or rebuild the file system after clearing the partition table with the diskpart clean command.