Symptoms of raw file system
You may encounter following message when you open your disk in Windows Explorer:
Disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?
Or
You need to format the disk in drive E: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?
When you open the Properties Window of that disk, you will see The File system of it is RAW or empty, and the Used space and Free space are all 0 bytes.
In Disk Management of Computer Management window, you can also see its File System is RAW.
Then, you may want to fix it by CHKDSK. Unfortunately, it says, “The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.”
Attention! Don’t do it when you are prompt to format the disk. Or you will lose more data and get harder to recover it.
What is RAW Disk or Partition
When you see above messages, that means the files system data on you disk or partition is corrupted. This may be caused by following reasons:
- Virus destroy file system data
- Eject disk when computer is writing data into it
- Unexpected power off
File system is the data that describe how operating system store files and folders on disks. If these data are corrupted, the operating system will think the disk is unformatted, and not know how to find files and folders on the disk.
Recover Files from RAW Disk/Partition
How to get back the data on the raw disk? Here is a powerful data recovery tool that can help you easily get back nearly all the files on that disk. First download, install and launch it, then follow the steps bellow to recover files on raw disk.
Step 1 Go to Standard mode and click Partition Recovery
Step 2 Select physical drive that the raw partition in
Step 3 Select the raw partition you want to recover
Step 4 Start scan and save recovered files
This Data Recovery tool also has a Mac version, you can use the Mac version if you have a Mac computer.
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Recover Files from RAW Disk or Partition