My USB flash drive is corrupted. What steps can I try to fix it?

1) First, try the steps mentioned in "How can I manually partition / format my USB Flash drive?" section above.

If it doesn't work, download and open the Rufus application specified on our USB Booting page.

Select your non-functioning USB flash drive within the Rufus application and follow the steps below:

2) In the Rufus application, use the Ctrl+Alt+Z key combination for the "Fast" Zap (zero) operation to write zeros to your entire USB flash drive. This operation does not overwrite blocks that are already zeroed and works quickly. Nevertheless, this process may take some time, so please be patient until it completes.

After the process is finished, remove and reinsert your USB flash drive. Then, attempt to perform a quick format in the appropriate format.

3) If the above step doesn't work, once again in the Rufus application, use the Alt+Z key combination for the Zap (zero) operation to write zeros to your entire USB flash drive. In this operation, unlike the previous step, all blocks are written with zeros regardless of whether they were zeroed before or not. This process may take a considerable amount of time, so please patiently wait until it completes.

After the process is finished, remove and reinsert your USB flash drive. Then, attempt to perform a quick format in the appropriate format.

4) Please also check Rufus can't detect/format my drive and reports that it is read-only or contains no media and Help, Rufus damaged my flash drive! pages.