How to fix the "Disk corrupted" issue

The disk may be corrupted for a physical or logical reason. Cases of physical damage to the disk cannot be repaired at home, you need to send the disk to specialists who have the necessary equipment and spare parts in case of replacement, for example, the disk head.

Logical disk corruption is due to incorrect metadata including both volume and file systems metadata records on this disk. The operating system driver is responsible for checking the metadata, which, at the time the disk is detected, reads certain sectors and parses the data in the hope of finding:

1. Information about volumes (partitions) on the device.
2. Information about the file system on the volume.
3. Information about the root folder and its contents.

If any of these metadata records is corrupted, the operating system displays the messages that the disk is not available and corrupted.

Purely theoretically, you can try to find exactly which metadata is damaged and edit it in the hope that the operating system will recognize it as healthy and show files and folders. Our experiments on editing FAT and NTFS metadata can be found here. However, it should be clearly understood that this is a dangerous way with very small chances of success.

The safe approach in this case is to try Windows data recovery software such as ReclaiMe File Recovery. The program runs in read-only mode, which means there is no further data corruption to the device. Download, install and run - everything usually takes about 10 minutes, and you will see your files and folders, which you can immediately copy to another volume, format the "damaged" disk (how?), and continue using it as before.

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