Find/Remove Hidden Paritition on USB Drive

What are USB drive hidden partitions?

USB drives are used to store and transfer important data. Users could divide a USB drive into several parts to categorize files depending on the storage capacity. Those parts are partitions.

In some cases, hidden partitions on hard drives and USB flash drives to store data, recovery software, and utilities intentionally to improve data security. Users couldn’t find those hidden partitions in Windows File Explorer. The most common hidden partitions of hard drives are recovery partitions which contain necessary system files. If your recovery partition is accidentally deleted, you can’t restore the OS to its original state after a Windows crash or corruption.  

However, what if you can’t see one of your USB drive partitions or your important files on the USB drive disappear? A partition of the flash drive is hidden, which may have been lost or accidentally deleted by you. How are you going to recover hidden or deleted partitions from a USB flash drive? Learn how to use simple methods to unhide your hidden partitions on USB drives.

Why does a partition get hidden on a USB flash drive?

Kinds of reasons could cause hidden partitions on a USB flash drive. Knowing why a partition gets hidden on the USB flash drive could help you to prevent partition loss in the future.

Accidental deletion. Sometimes, you may unintentionally delete a partition on the USB drive when making disk management.

A severe virus or malware infection on the USB flash drive partition can cause partitions missing from the location.

Inadvertently formatting, reformatting, or erasing a partition on a USB flash drive.

If the header of your USB flash drive partition becomes corrupted, the partition will sometimes become hidden.

Improper ejection of USB flash drive could cause damage to the partitions.

Improper operation of creating new partitions on USB flash drive.

The file system of the USB flash drive has changed or corrupted.

How to find hidden partition on USB drive?

After you find partitions on the USB drive are hidden, the first thing you need to do is to check the status of partitions in Windows Disk Management.

If the hidden partitions are marked “Unallocated” or with an asterisk, you could try to create a new partition or assign a drive letter to the hidden partitions. To avoid data loss, you’d better use a USB drive partition recovery tool to restore the hidden partitions.

Case A. Restore unallocated space on a USB drive without losing data

To recover the unallocated space on a USB flash drive, many partition recovery tools are available on the market. AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard is widely regarded as the most dependable and professional partition recovery software for recovering lost or deleted partitions from USB flash drives.

If the data stored in the hidden partitions are not overwritten, the hidden partition and data will be restored together with the help of AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard.

AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard is a built-in function of AOMEI Partition Assistant. To recover hidden partitions on a USB drive, you could download the demo version for a trial.

Step 1. Select “Partition Recovery Wizard” on the left panel of AOMEI Partition Assistant. And choose the USB drive and click “Next”.

Step 2. There are two kinds of search modes: Fast Search & Full Search. It’s recommended to select “Fast Search” at the first for saving time.

Step 3. After the search process completes, the partition recovery software will show all the deleted or lost partitions on the USB drive. Select the one you want to recover and click “Proceed”.

Step 4. USB partition recovery will finish in a few seconds when you see the “Congratulations” page.

Except for partition recovery, AOMEI Partition Assistant provides other awesome features, applicable for everyone. It has basic disk management functions like: creating, resizing, moving, merging, splitting, format partitions, allocating free space, quick partition, etc.

Moreover, some advanced features like MBR/GPT converter, dynamic/basic disk converter, make bootable media, Windows To Go Creator, etc.  

Case B. Assign a drive letter to the hidden partition

Partitions that lost drive letters can’t be recognized by Windows, it seems the partitions are hidden. You could use Disk Management to reassign a drive letter to the hidden partition.

Step 1. Press “Win + R” and type “diskmgmt.msc” in the Run window to open Disk Management.

Step 2. Locate the hidden partitions on the USB drive. Right-click the partition and choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths”.

Step 3. Click "Add" to open the "Add Drive Letter or Path". Select "Assign the following drive letter" and choose an available drive letter to name the hidden partition. Go to Windows File Explorer to check whether the hidden partition is recovered.

How to remove partition from USB drive

Some users may want to know how to delete hidden partitions on a USB drive to get more available space and make the fullest use of the USB drive. You could use AOMEI Partition Assistant to delete the hidden partition directly and allocated the space to the existed partitions.

Alternatively, you could try to delete a hidden partition on the USB drive using the Disk Management tool.

Step 1. Right-click “This PC” > Manage > Disk Management.

Step 2. Right-click the hidden partition on the USB, and select “Delete Volume” from the menu.

If you found there are some hidden files on a USB drive, you could go to “Control Panel” > “Appearance and Personalization” > “File Explorer Options” > “View” > “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”. Moreover, you could use freeware-WinfrGUI if you deleted or lost files on a USB drive.

How to recover hidden files on USB drive

If you find your important files are hidden, you could unhide files via File Explorer settings. Open File Explorer and head to This PC. You can see your USB drive here. And if you want to find the hidden files, on the top of the window, you can see lots of tabs like Home, Share, View, etc. Click the View tab and enable the Hidden items checkbox. All hidden files and folders in USB drive can be seen now.

However, if you find this method doesn't work, your files may be deleted accidentally. In this case, a third-party data recovery software could be your best choice. It's recommended to use a professional one-MyRecover. It can restore more than 200 types of deleted or lost files from hard drives, external hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, cameras, etc. in Windows 11/10/8/7 and Windows Server.

Download and install MyRecover to restore lost files from USB drives.

Step 1. Insert your USB drive to your computer and then open MyRecover. Hover the mouse over your USB drive and click Scan.

Step 2. The software will scan your USB drive quickly. You can recover the files directly once you find the deleted files in the scanning list.>/p>

Step 3. Select the files you want to recover and then click "Recover XX files" to save them to another location.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you can find hidden partition on USB drive via methods above. It's easy to recover the deleted or lost partitions via AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard. Besides, if you want to recover deleted or lost files from USB drive, professional data recovery software-MyRecover could be the best assistant.