What is RAW drive, how to recover RAW drive?

Are you troubled with raw drive like your SD card, CF card, external hard drive, hard disk partition, pen drive, USB flash drive, memory stick, memory card, etc.

This article will introduce what is RAW drive or RAW file system and how to recover RAW drive, fix RAW file system, convert RAW drive to NTFS or recover data from RAW drive.

What is RAW drive?

Sometimes people call it raw drive or raw file system. The properties of the drive often shows 0 bytes while there were important files, photos stored there before (Right click the drive and select "Properties") and the file system shows RAW.

It pops up an error message as follow when you access the drive by double-clicking it.

• Invalid media type reading drive. Abort, Retry, Fail?
• Windows may ask if you want to format the drive, such as a warning reads "The disk in drive (X) is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?".

  

• File names contain "weird" characters.
• "Sector not found" messages.

Also a CHKDSK tool will complain that it is unable to perform a RAW file system recovery.

• The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drive.

RAW file system is not really a type of file system but presents a problem of your drive or partition. We know often used file system like NTFS, FAT16/FAT32 or EXT2/EXT3. So what is RAW file system? Just a system error that makes your partition become RAW and you cannot access files there without some recovery software.

How to recover RAW drive?

EaseUS Free data recovery software is always available no matter the RAW drive has been formatted or not. The key point is never using the drive again before all data you want has been successfully recovered from it. This is what all data recovery experts would advise you to perform - keep the scene!

Tutorial: step by step guide to recover files from RAW drive.

How to convert RAW drive to NTFS?

If the file system was NTFS before, format the RAW drive to NTFS file system after getting all lost files back. If necessary, copy the recovered data back. Now, you have recovered RAW drive and converted RAW drive to NTFS file system.

Don't let this happen again.

Back up your partition with free backup software.

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