How to recover RAW drive or recover files from RAW drive?

Introduction

You must be freaking out when one day receiving such notices below:

• Invalid media type reading drive. Abort, Retry, Fail?
• File system is displayed as "RAW".
• 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.

Then you right click the drive, and choose the Property from the popped-up menu, finding that the file system is displayed as "RAW" in the Drive Property Window and the file names may also contain "weird" characters in the drive. You may wonder what does "RAW" mean and how this could happen. Put it in a simple way, the hard drive is inaccessible because the DBR (a crucial part of the file system which is important to organize information in the hard drive) has been damaged by some kinds of reasons, like virus infection, format failure, accidentally shut down operating system, power outages, etc.

No matter what they are, the result is all the same: your hard drive is inaccessible and you have to take action to rescue the data in the "RAW" drive.

Solution

If you accidentally formatted your hard drive and all your data is gone, you can still recover your data follow the steps below.

1. Stop what you're doing

The most common symptom for "RAW" drive is that Windows pops up a warning, asking you to format the inaccessible drive when you try to access it. After receiving this notice, you should have a strong sense of "DO Nothing". If you are so eager to get your data in it and click YES to format the hard drive. Tragedy will come after the format order. All your data in it would suddenly disappear and methods to get them back would be more complicated and risky. This is why the first step is "Stop what you're doing". This step decides the chances of fixing the corrupted drive and getting your data back.

So remember not to format the drive before you get all your needed data back, otherwise you will lose them.

2. Find the right RAW drive recovery software

Partition recovery software: The tool will fix the damaged DBR of the file system so that the drive can become accessible again and you can also explore the data in it, but you can fix boot sector of the partition with partition recovery sfotware.

Data recovery software: This tool focuses more on the data security in the inaccessible hard drive by scanning the drive and finds all needed data in it. Then users can choose another safe place to save their data. After data in the inaccessible drive has been safely transferred, you can perform the format and make the drive accessible again.

3. Recover RAW drive

If you decide to rescue the data in the RAW drive through data recovery software, there are hundreds of freeware for you. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free is a good choice for it provides "Complete Recovery" module focusing on data recovery from formatted and RAW drive. Download it at the download page, choose "Complete Recovery" and specify certain file types to search (if you are very clear about the file types of all data in the RAW drive and much time can be saved to pick the right data you want to recover at the search result page). Then let the program scan the RAW drive and the search result will be listed out within a few minutes. There you can find what you want to get back and transfer them to a safer place.

After that, format the RAW drive and you will find the inaccessible drive becomes accessible again. If you think it necessary, you can copy all data back to where they before. Refer to How to recover files from RAW drive?

4. Don't let this happen again

RAW drive often happens without notice. To get rid of this trouble, you should avoid some wrong doings that might cause DBR being damaged. A good method is to backup up your data so that you always have a backup of your information when this unfortunate thing falls on you.

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