Raw Filesystem
In Microsoft Windows a drive reported as "File System: RAW" could mean that all information referring to the partition and the file system have been lost.
On a brand new drive RAW file system is a kind of original file system before format, which cannot be recognized by Windows. Therefore, naturally, you need to format this drive and change the RAW into NTFS or Fat32, which is the files system after the format.
On a formatted drive RAW file system is usually an indication of a problem, like the drive going bad, or somehow the file allocation table has been lost. If the drive is a hard drive, it could also mean damage to the MBR (Master Boot Record) "Boot Sector." The RAW drive condition can occur on a hard drive, and on other storage devices like a flash memory card. It may show a memory card error on your camera, smartphone, or it may be shown as a RAW device under the Microsoft Windows operating system.
There are two places where we store file system information: the MBR partition Table and Volumes boot sector, When the file system information provided on these 2 sectors of disk is not good you may see chkdsk reporting raw file system (though the data is still there).
Related Errors:
- Cyclic redundancy check
- file system changed from FAT32 to RAW
- 0 bytes free and 0 bytes used
USB flash drive suddenly says RAW
The partition of the USB drive is corrupt or damaged under Windows environment. If the flash memory is physically going bad, all you can do is attempt to recover the data with a date recovery tool like those mentioned in Mobile Drive Data Recovery.
If something happened to erase part of the drive format so it appears as RAW to Microsoft Windows, and the drive is still physically ok, there is no way to directly convert the RAW back to FAT32 or NTFS. You still have to use a data recovery tool to extract what you can, then format the drive. If you can successfully format the drive, it might still be ok to use. You will have to copy your data back to the drive.
When you use a data recovery tool, the data may be recovered, such as photos and music, however, the file names will be lost. All of the files will be recovered with alphanumeric names rather than the original file names. The data gets recovered, the names do not. The directory structure will also be lost. It sucks, but it is better than losing all of your photos. You will have to manually rename everything you want distinctive file names for.
Data Recovery Utilities:
- recover data as files, but not the original file names.
- recovers things you may not want like files you deleted recently
- recovers duplicate data
- recovers some broken files or partial data
- does not recover directory structure
It is often advised to use a duplicate file finder on everything that was recovered to mitigate redundancy.
