Fixed: File or Directory Is Corrupted and Unreadable in Windows

The file or directory is corrutped and unreadble 

“I purchased a new USB flash drive 2 years ago and it contains my important files. Works great all the time until yesterday. A power failure occurred when I was performing a standard backup of this drive. When I restarted the computer then and tried to open the USB, it says ‘H:\ is not accessible the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable’. Under the disk management screen it now indicates the file system as RAW instead of NTFS. Why does this happen? Can I fix it?”

Possible causes for "file or directory is corrupted"

Although “partition not accessible” is a common error for many users, few of them know the reasons behind it. Why this occurs? In general, possible causes include:

▸MFT (Master File Table) or FAT (File Allocation Table) gets corrupted.

▸The hard drive is under virus attack.

▸There are bad sectors existing on the disk.

▸Remove the disk from the computer in an improper way.

Solutions to “The file or directory is corrupted”

After figuring out why the partition becomes inaccessible and unreadable, now you must be curious about how to fix it accordingly. We list easy solutions below and you can have a try. Before proceeding, you can run anti-virus software to check whether the problem can be resolved. If not, keep reading.

Solution 1. Check and repair file system error

First of all, you can use Chkdsk.exe, a command-line tool offered by Windows, to check and repair disk/partition errors.

Step1. Click "Start" button and search for "Command Prompt", then right-click it and select "Run as administrator".

Step 2. In the following message box, click "Yes" to allow it to change your computer.

Step 3. In the Command Prompt box, continue to type “chkdsk g: /f”and press Enter. g is the drive letter of the unreadable partition.

If you don't want to type or run such commands lines, or your hard drive becomes RAW and CHDKSK does not work on this RAW drive, you can check disk with the freeware: AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard by the following steps below.

Step 1. Download, install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the unreadable partition, and select “Advanced”>“Check Partition”.

Step 2. Select first method to check and fix errors, then click “OK” button. If your hard drive is turned into RAW format, you can only choose the last method.

Step 3. When it completed, click “OK”.

Solution 2. Format the inaccessible partition

If the last method does not work, you can try to format the inaccessible partition directly. Since the formatting process will destroy all data on the partition, you should recover data via data recovery software and back up them to another safe location if possible.

In order to format the partition successfully and avoid potential format errors in Disk Management, File Explorer or DiskPart, you can make use of AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard as well, which is powerful enough to format corrupted, RAW or write protected hard drive with ease.

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, right click the partition with a problem, and select “Format Partition”.

Step 2. Choose a file system as you need and click “OK”.

Step 3. Back to the main interface, click “Apply” to start formatting the accessible partition.

Bottom Line

Now, you know why "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" error occurs, and how to fix it accordingly. Obviously, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is a great disk manager to help deal with disk partition issues. Besides, its advanced edition-AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro allows you to get back lost partitions, extend system partition, migrate system drive between MBR and GPT drives, allocate free space from one drive to another, and more.