How to recover RAW drive?

What is RAW drive, how to recover RAW drive?

Your storage device like SD card, CF card, external hard drive, hard disk partition, pen drive, USB flash drive, memory stick, memory card, etc. might have become raw. That means you can't access data in it, then what you gonna to do?

This article will introduce "what is RAW drive", 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?".

    Format tip

  • 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.

CardRecoverPro is always available no matter the RAW drive has been formatted or not. Following the below steps to recovery RAW drive:

  • 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!
  • Second is to get reliable data recovery software for recovering - Download EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free and install it on your non-data loss hard drive.
  • Use it to scan data loss region and then all lost will be listed out.