Does it happened to you? You normally turned on your system, to fetch some important work documents from one of your hard disks. And what you get instead is an error message “The file or directory is corrupted or file system not found.”
This means your Hard Disk has become RAW.?♀️
This is too much distressing. Now you wonder what is that? How to resolve this issue. In the meanwhile, while you try to access the drive like D:/, E:/, and any other, the system prompts you to format the drive.
Formatting means you will lose all your data, if you haven’t kept any backup.
So how to restore your data back?
Don’t worry! Here you covered with details about RAW hard disk issue and recover your data.
What is RAW Disk On Windows?
RAW Disk is the common disk partition issues faced by the Windows Users. When the system fails to detect the filesystem like exFAT, FAT(32) and NTFS, it is considered to be RAW, and the user may not be able to access the disk and its stored data.
The hard drive partitions may become RAW due to various reasons like:
- Sudden corruption of the system or drive;
- Virus attacks,
- Registry damages;
- Accidental shutdown of the system during partition or so;
- Disk not properly partitioned or too many partition at the simultaneously and many such.
Any of these reasons can turn your storage Drives or external hard drive as RAW. This can be most frustrating things as the drive contains huge amounts of important data that sometimes we can’t afford to lose. Once your disk becomes RAW, it prevent users to access any data or files stored within. If you want to recover photos from formatted hard drive then click here.
How To identify if a hard disk becomes RAW
When you try to access your RAW drives, you may encounter some error messages on the system like:
- Windows cannot access the disk❌
- Disk not formatted do you want to format it now❌
- Hard drive not recognized❌
- The type of the file system is raw❌
- chkdsk is not available for raw drives❌
In this case, Windows will prompt you to format the disk to solve the issue, but doing so will permanently delete your data within. So, skip doing that.
How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS
As said earlier, data within the RAW Disk partition cannot be recovered or accessed as the system does not recognize the file-system. However, there are some reliable and professional tools designed for performing data recovery from RAW Disk.
Although there are many choices to recover your lost or deleted files from RAW disk on Windows OS. But our experts choice is Stellar Windows Data Recovery Professional.
Stellar Windows Data Recovery Professional is compatible with all versions of Windows OS. And is specifically designed to RAW Data Recovery from hard drive partitions and external drive. Whatever the issue behind your RAW disk appearance, it can scan the corrupted disk in the real-time and list all the file types like documents, photos, videos and so ever. It presents a preview of the files with its original attributes like name, data, time and file extension.
Stellar Windows Data Recovery Professional comes with a special feature of ‘Raw Recovery‘ that deeply scans the disk to recover most of the traces of files and data that can be recovered.
- Download and Install the Stellar Windows Recovery Professional tool on your computer. The Dashboard appears as:
- Now click on settings icon (as shown in image) to open ‘Advanced Settings’.
Stellar Data Recovery Professional Homepage
- Now select ‘Add Header’ option. Here, you need to add file types: you can choose the desired option, (as shown in the image). If you don’t know then proceed to the step 5.
How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS 2
- Now, next you need to insert File Signature. You can add upto 10 file type and click on “Add File Type”.
How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS 3
- Now proceed further to select the location from where you want to recover your data. Here, you see all the connected drives.
- Choose ‘Can’t Find Drive’ option and press the Scan Button. After scanning is completed, it will present a list of all hard drives found on the system.
How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS 4
- Now, press the “Search” icon just below the listed hard drives section. It will show the details of the drives along with drive letter and other details.
How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS 5
- It will list all the partitions below section, now choose the partition from the list you want to recover the data. If you don’t find it, click on the deep scan option.
How to Recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS 6
- The tool will list all the data from the selected drive that can be recovered with preview. If you have found the desired files, then click on Recover.
Click On Recover
This is how you can recover Lost or Deleted Files from RAW Disk on Windows OS. If you still don’t find the desired files, the click on the “Deep scan” and recover the files.
