How to Scan a USB Flash Drive with XRecovery on Windows

Updated by XAppSet Team

Use this workflow when Windows recognizes the USB flash drive as a stable physical device. For RAW, formatted, corrupted, or unrecognized cases, first read the matching USB recovery guide so that repair actions do not change the source.

USB flash drive connected to a Windows laptop with a separate external destination drive
Select the correct USB source, run quick and deep scanning, and export to another physical device.

Prepare

XRecovery 3.1.6 runs only on Windows. Install it on a disk other than the USB source. Attach a separate healthy destination with enough space for recovered files. Do not format, initialize, repair, or write test files to the USB drive.

Select the drive

Open XRecovery and compare the device capacity and connection. Select the USB physical device or its relevant partition. Avoid choosing another similarly sized removable drive.

Start scanning

Double-click the source or select it and use the scan button. Quick scan starts first and deep scan begins automatically afterward. Review results as they appear, but let the deep phase complete when the source is stable and missing files have not yet been found.

Camera Enhancement is a separate algorithm path for supported camera-media recovery. It runs automatically only when the enhancement entry is selected. It is not part of an ordinary USB partition scan.

Review and recover

Inspect file-system results for names and folders and signature-based results for supported content without original metadata. Filter and preview representative files where available. Support covers common photo, video, and document formats, not every format.

Recover a representative sample to another physical device. XRecovery warns against using the scanned source as the destination and blocks it by default, although the warning can be overridden. Do not override it.

Open and validate the exported files. Check complete documents, archive extraction, full-resolution photos, and multiple points in videos with audio. The free allowance is 2 GB in total. Keep the source unchanged until the needed data exists in verified copies.

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