How to fix "Disk is not accessible. The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable." issue?

You can get this Windows error when you try to open a device in Window Explorer that has corrupted file system metadata. In our experiment to identify errors in metadata resulting in such an error, we got this message after editing the header in an NTFS MFT record - see details here.

The only safe way to extract data from a volume after such an error is to recover the data using a special data recovery program, read detailed instructions here. This is safe because such programs only read sectors on the volume, trying to reconstruct the folder tree and pointers to the contents of the files. Since different vendors of such software use different algorithms, you can try several tools and stop at the one that gave the best result. Read about the comparison of the best data recovery software for Windows file systems.

It is important to understand that such a problem is a logical one, which means that as soon as you extract all the data you need from the device, you can safely format it in Disk Management and continue storing data on it. Read the guide How to format a RAW disk.

Still have questions?