Raw Drive Recovery: How to Recover Data from Raw Drives

Raw Drive Recovery: How to Recover Data from Raw Drives

I know how frustrating when Windows cannot recognize your hard drives or partitions and tells you that your hard drives have become RAW. Well, the fact is, the situation has yet to go to where it cannot be saved. So, don’t panic. You still get your chance to perform raw drive recovery.

Two main methods in the category can help you recover data from the raw drive. You can choose to recover the raw partition by fixing the file system to be recognizable, like formatting the RAW drive. Or you can try another approach: extract the files and documents you need from the RAW drive with data recovery software.

What is a Raw Drive?

All storage drives like SSD, HDD, and USB flash drives have a file system that can effectively write and read data. The three main types of Windows file systems are FAT (FAT32 and exFAT), NTFS, and ReFS. And when the file system becomes RAW, it means that the Windows system won’t be able to recognize this hard drive as well as all the data inside it.
If you try to open this non-system disk, a window will pop up asking you to format it before using it.

Formatting a disk usually solves a lot of challenging drive problems, but in the meantime, it deletes all the data on it. When you get a raw hard drive, your Windows computer won’t access this hard drive, the only way is to get it to a recognizable file system, or you directly pull all the data out of this raw drive. There are a few ways for you to check if your hard drive has become RAW:

1. Run Windows Disk Management and see if there are disks with the RAW file system there.
2. Type in “chkdsk” command in CMD and check if it says “the type of file system is RAW”.

Your hard drive became RAW probably because:

Luckily, a raw hard drive doesn’t necessarily mean that you lost your data. You cannot access them. However, there are still ways to get them. You can use data recovery tools to perform RAW data recovery, restore them, and add them to other locations.

How to Perform Raw Drive Recovery?

Considering that if you have the urge to retrieve your precious files and documents from the RAW hard drive, we recommend that you use data recovery software to extract your data first before fixing it. Among all the data recovery tools on the market, WorkinTool Data Recovery Software is one of the best.

WorkinTool Data Recovery is a well-experienced recovery tool for all kinds of data loss situations, file corruption, and formatted disk recovery. No matter how you lose your data, you can have the ultimate recovery experience here to recover deleted pictures, restore lost videos, and many other items. It’s not just the data on the computer’s hard drive. Using this recovery tool, you can also recover any lost data from a USB flash drive. It is so powerful because it can recognize over 400 different file types and trace them back to recover them.

Another reason you should use WorkinTool RAW recovery software is that it also supports users to recover files from a formatted hard drive. So, even if you accidentally formatted it without backup, you still have a getaway method to restore your data. More importantly, using all the features with No Ads is 100％ FREE and SAFE. Now let’s see how it works.

1. Launch WorkinTool Data Recovery, and choose Disk & Partition Recovery.

2. Locate the Raw hard drive and unrecognizable disk partition, then click Scan Now.

3. Use the Filter feature to find the files and documents that you want to recover. Set a savings path (Remember to put your recovered files in another location) and start recovering.

How to Fix a RAW Drive?

The method above is to help users to recover all the data inside the RAW drive. But what about the RAW drive itself? The hard drive still did not get any repairs to make it functional again. Don’t worry. Here are two free approaches you can use. These are both Windows built-in features for you to handle partition problems.

Method 1: Reformat the Raw Drive

So now we know the main issue for the RAW drive is that it lacks a file system for Windows to recognize. The easiest and most Windows-recommended method is to reformat this RAW drive. But you should know formatting a hard drive will delete all the data inside. Therefore, the process is more suitable for an emptied hard drive to use for RAW hard drive recovery.

Method 2: Use Command Feature

Another method to fix the RAW hard drive without formatting it is to use the CMD feature. With the CHKDSK command, you can check if the hard drive becomes RAW and also have a chance to fix your RAW hard drive without formatting it. As long as your hard drive appears with a drive letter, you can use this CMD method to fix it.

Step 1. Launch CMD as administrator.

Step 2. Type in “chkdsk H: /f” and tap Enter on the keyboard. H is the letter on your RAW hard drive.

Step 3. Open Disk Management to check if the RAW hard drive is repaired.

Bottom Line

As you can see in this article, RAW drive recovery is not hard at all. There are literally dozens of ways to get it right. Here in our post, we have concluded the reasons for your drives were becoming RAW. We also describe the method of using WorkinTool data recovery software to recover data from raw hard drives directly. As well as two alternatives to fix the RAW hard drives are also included. All the methods and tools we recommend here are totally free with no ads. Try it for yourself. Right now.