How to Fix A RAW Drive in Windows 10/8/7?

What is a RAW drive (or RAW file system)?

In Windows, partitions without a known or recognizable file system like FAT32 or NTFS will be marked as RAW. It occurs when none of the systems drivers is able to recognize file system types. The RAW drive issue not only happens to the hard drive like C drive in Windows, but also happens to other data storage devices such as external hard drive, SD cards, USB flash drive and so on.

What causes the issue?

The main reasons for RAW drive issue can be concluded as below:

•disk or volume wasn’t formatted (or was formatted incorrectly);

•the type of file system is not compatible with the current operating system;

•bad sectors/blocks exist on the drive;

•damaged file system structure or MBR partition table.

When you try to access a RAW hard drive turns in Windows, you will probably receive different error messages like" disk in drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now ", "The volume does not contain a recognized file system…" and more. Sometimes, you will also find the drive shows 0 bytes space (Used space and free space) in Properties.

How to fix a RAW drive in Windows?

When it comes to RAW drive repair, users are more likely to run CHKDSK to check whether there are some bad sectors on the drive. But you might encounter the error “chkdsk is not available for RAW drives”. Thus you can turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, which allows you to check bad sectors on RAW drive in Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista. Besides, it also offers you two other methods to fix RAW drive. Below are detailed guides.

Solution 1. Check bad sector

To check whether there is bad sector on the RAW drive partition successfully, follow the steps:

Step 1. Free download, install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right click the RAW partition (it might show as Unformatted here) and select “Advance”> “Check Partition”. 

Step 2. Tick “Check whether there is bad sector on the partition” and click “OK”.

Step 3. Then you’ll get into the Start interface, click “Start” and wait for the process to complete.

Solution 2. Rebuild MBR partition table

If no bad sectors are found through the first solution, there are chances that the MBR partition table gets damaged. You can rebuild it directly as the instruction below.

Step 1. Run AOMEI Partition Assistant, right-click the RAW drive and select “Rebuild MBR”. 

Step 2. Choose a suitable MBR type for your current OS and click “OK”.

Step 3. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant, click “Apply” >“Proceed” to commit the pending operation.

Solution 3. Format RAW drive to NTFS/FAT32

If the first two methods do not resolve the RAW drive issue yet, you can try to format RAW drive to NTFS/FAT32.

Notes:✎

The formatting process will cause data loss, so you can try a data recovery software such as Recoverit Pro to retrieve important data in advance.

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant, right-click the RAW partition and select “Format Partition”. 

Step 2. Choose FAT32 (or NTFS) under the file system drop-down menu and click “OK”.

Step 3. Click “Apply” to execute the pending operation.

Summary

This is all about why a drive is markup as RAW, as well as how to fix a RAW drive with or without formatting in Windows 10/8/7 via the versatile AOMEI Partition Assistant. If you want to experience more advanced features like recovering lost partition,  convert MBR and GPT disk for Windows 11 upgrade, quickly partitioning hard drive, you can upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro.