If your hard disk drive, USB stick or memory card is recognized by Windows, then you can easily recover files using programs like Recuva. But what if the disk is not recognized at all? If the disk is not recognized by Windows, then ordinary file recovery programs cannot recover data from them. This is where the EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard comes in. It is a free software that is capable of recovering lost files even from disks that Windows does not identify, thinks they are unformatted or displays them as RAW disks.
You can download EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard from the EaseUs website. The downloaded setup file is only 5 MB in size. After the installation, run the Data Recovery Wizard from its desktop shortcut. At this point, you should insert your memory card or USB stick in your computer (or any other disk, data from which you want to recover).
You are shown three options – deleted file recovery, complete recovery and partition recovery. If you are able to see and access your disk drive in Windows and only want to recover the accidentally deleted files, then you can choose the Deleted File Recovery. If your disk is not recognized or is labeled as RAW disk by Windows, then you should choose Complete File Recovery. If you accidentally deleted a partition from your disk, then you can choose the Partition Recovery.
In our case, we are trying to recover files from a USB stick that Windows is not recognizing, so we proceed to Complete File Recovery. In the next step, you have to choose the type of files that you want to recover from the disk drive. You can select files of different types like graphics, videos, audio, documents etc. You can also select all types of files by checking the box All types.
In the next step, you are presented with a list of partitions for all the disks available in your computer. These partitions can be of many types like FAT/FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, RAW etc. Select the partition from which you want to recovery files. The icons displayed for different types of partitions make it easy to identify the hard disk partitions from the removable disk partitions.
Clicking on the Next button would make the Data Recovery Wizard to start scanning your selected partition for all the selected files that can be recovered from it. A progress window is shown which displays how many partition tables, boot records, folders and files that have been found on the partition. It also indicates the number of lost files that have been identified as a specific type of file.
It displays the number of historic and current partitions found on the selected drive/partition. On my selected USB stick, it found a FAT32 partition and an older NTFS partition that I had forgotten about. The number of recoverable files are also displayed next to the detected partitions. You can select the partitions from which you want to scan and recover files.
Finally it shows a list of files and folders found on your disk partition in the folder hierarchy format as well as category-wise format based on file types. You can see all the files belnging to a particular file type group or browse the folder structure. But before you start recovering the files, you should select the file and click on the File Preview to have a look at the file preview. The free version of Data Recovery Wizard allows you only a total of 2 GB files to be recovered. So before you jump on recovering the files, use the file preview feature and decide if you really want to recover that file. In order to recover files, you can select them and click on the Recover button.
EaseUS Data Recovery is an all-in-one data recovery software that allows you to scan and recover not only deleted files but also lost or damaged partitions. It is also capable of recovering your files from inaccessible, unrecognized or RAW disk drives. The free version has a file recovering limit of 2 GB which is good enough for restoring files on memory cards and USB sticks, but you can always buy the commercial paid version if you want to recover more data.
You can download EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard Free from http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm.