4 ways to return RAW file system to NTFS or FAT32 without data loss

Good afternoon Dear readers, administrators and just guests, I am glad to see you again on one of the popular IT blogs Pyatilistnik.org. Not long ago, we successfully solved two global problems in Microsoft operating systems, namely, we eliminated the black screen when loading Windows 10 and were able to defeat the endless update of Windows 8.1, for which I congratulate you. But Windows does not want to give up and periodically throws up interesting and not always pleasant situations. I have a 4 TB Seagate NAS HDD hard drive, on which I store a collection of films. On one of the beautiful winter days, the HDD drive began to be detected as a RAW file system and could not be opened by standard OS tools. Naturally, I would like to return it to working condition and correct the RAW format without data loss , which is what we will actually do in this article and, most importantly, learn how to prevent such situations in the future.

What is RAW (file system)

Surely many of my readers, the overwhelming majority, know only the NTFS file system, since it is a standard in operating systems of the Windows family; those who are older and more technically savvy know FAT16 and FAT32. Those who follow the latest news and trends in the industry have already managed to read, and some have become acquainted with the new ReFS, but few know about the “file system” ( HDD state ) RAW, and this is not surprising, since if you are familiar with it , then in most cases you have problems.

A RAW file system is a state of a hard drive or other storage device that does not have a known Windows file system. Since there is no file system on the disk, there can be no files or folders on the disk, and it cannot be used to store data, that's what your Windows thinks and you shouldn't blame it for that.

You can read a little more about the RAW file system here https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_(file_system)

Antiviruses will return NTFS

Check your system for viruses. The following will help:

• MALWAREBYTES – trial version works fully for 14 days, you can download it from the official website. https://ru.malwarebytes.com/premium;
• Dr.Web CureIt! – free for use at home, you can download it from the developer’s website by following the link. https://free.drweb.ru/download+cureit+free. Having ruled out a virus attack, and if it was not possible to restore a normal file system, proceed to further instructions.

Reasons why RAW appears on hard drives

Here is a list of the main problems due to which your HDD may appear as RAW:

• MBR partition table corruption
• Corruption of boot blocks on the file system
• If you had NTFS, then the MFT main file table area may have been damaged
• Your disk initially has a different file system, for example, when it was previously part of a RAID array, since storage systems have their own file systems.
• There is a problem with the drivers, your system could not find the correct driver that could correctly identify the HDD.
• Incorrect or abnormal computer shutdown
• Problem with USB ports on motherboard
• Problem with docking stations for externally connecting hard drives
• You do not correctly remove your flash drive or HDD, as a result of which you break its file system; unfortunately, NTFS is critical to this. Here, on the one hand, the user is illiterate, and on the other hand, he is slightly deceived by the operating system, a simple example, you copy a file to your flash drive. You logically have a slider with the copying status, it visually ends, but the problem is that the system continues copying it from the buffer in the background. The buffer is created to speed up copying, and if at this moment a person simply pulls out the flash drive, then the information on it will, at best, be damaged. For such things there is a safe removal of the device.

Methods for repairing a RAW file system disk

There is a lot written on the Internet about various methods that supposedly help in restoring a hard drive or flash drive with RAW, but the problem with most sites is that they are not run by specialists who check everything from their own experience, but by stupid copywriters who simply rewrite other people’s articles with errors and mistakes, and to additional questions or errors, the authors of these articles simply blur and do not answer. As a result, the user loses his data and is disappointed with everything and everyone. Among the methods I want to highlight:

• Checking the disk for errors via CHKDSK, whether it only applies to the system disk or not, and in system recovery mode
• AOMEI Partition Assistant is a smart tool with extensive tools, thanks to which we enlarged the C drive in Windows 10 or converted a GPT drive to MBR.
• DMDE utility - it allows you to find lost partitions
• TestDisk - The utility also allows you to find lost partitions
• Active Partition Recovery for Windows Professional - can also correct errors in the boot sector
• Minitool Power Data Recovery is another tool that allows you to scan your hard drive for other file systems and allows you to recover RAW.

Recovering an NTFS partition from RAW to DMDE

It’s much more unpleasant if the disk that became RAW contained important data and you need to not only format it, but return the partition with this data.

In this situation, first I recommend trying a free program for data recovery and lost partitions (and not only for this) DMDE, the official website of which is dmde.ru (this guide uses the GUI version of the program for Windows).

The process of restoring a partition from RAW in a program will generally consist of the following steps:

1. Select the physical disk where the RAW partition is located (leave it enabled).

2. If a lost partition appears in the list of DMDE partitions (can be determined by the file system, size and strikethrough on the icon), select it and click “Open Volume”. If it is not displayed, perform a full scan to find it.

3. Check the contents of the section to see if this is what you need. If yes, click the “Show Partitions” button in the program menu (at the top of the screenshot).

4. Make sure the desired partition is highlighted and click "Recover". Confirm the recovery of the boot sector, and then click the “Apply” button at the bottom and save the rollback data to a file in a convenient location.

5. After a short time, the changes will be applied and the RAW disk will be accessible again and have the desired file system. You can exit the program.

Note: in my experiments, when fixing a RAW disk in Windows 10 (UEFI + GPT) using DMDE, immediately after the procedure the system reported disk errors (and the problem disk was accessible and contained all the data that was on it before) and suggested rebooting computer to fix them. After rebooting everything worked fine.

If you use DMDE to fix the system disk (for example, by connecting it to another computer), keep in mind that the following scenario is possible as a result: the RAW disk will return the original file system, but when connecting it to the “native” computer or laptop, the OS will not load. In this case, restore the bootloader.

What does a partition with a RAW file system look like?

And so, before I show you what to do when restoring your HDD or flash drive, I will show you what it all looks like. I have the Windows 8.1 operating system installed on my home computer, and I am satisfied with it in all respects. I also use regular 3.5-inch hard drives to store various information. On them I have films, music and a huge number of video lessons and courses. To connect hard drives I use Agestar docking stations, they are shown in the photo below.

One fine day, when connecting the drives, autorun did not work on one of them. I go to “My Computer” and what I see is that the drive I need has the letter G, but it does not display information about its size and load. When I tried to open it, Windows Explorer simply froze and did not respond for about 5 minutes.

After about five minutes, instead of opening the disk, a window appeared:

To use a disk in drive G: format it first. Do you want to format it?

Naturally, this was not part of my plans, since the disk is full of information. Sometimes I encountered this and it was related to the fact that the connected disk through the docking station did not have enough voltage, I switched it to another one, the effect was the same. I connected it directly via SATA, it was still unavailable.

I opened the Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) snap-in. The equipment itself also took about 5 minutes to open and become dull. As a result, I received a list of my hard drives, and what a surprise I was when I saw that my 4 terabyte drive had a RAW file system, and it had a letter assigned.

When I tried to open a RAW disk from Disk Management, I received the following error:

No access to G:\. The file or folder is damaged. Reading is impossible.

How to fix a disk with a RAW system

As I tell you many times, you always need to start from the physical level. First, open your “Device Manager” and make sure that you don’t have any yellow warnings on your equipment, especially in the “USB Controllers” section if you connect a disk or flash drive through them and in the “Disk Devices” section.

If there is yellowness or redness, then there is nothing good about it, it needs to be corrected. Possible errors may include codes on devices:

• Driver not installed (code 28)
• Error This device cannot start (code 10)
• This device failed to start (code 19)

Most often they are related to drivers. Therefore, I advise you to download and install the latest drivers for your computer equipment, focusing on the motherboard, disks and processor. I have already told you how to update drivers on a Windows computer; if you don’t know how, I advise you to read it.

Also, be sure to check your physical wires after updating the drivers; if possible, try installing others. You can plug external docking stations or a flash drive into another USB port to eliminate this probable cause. If there are no problems at the physics and hardware level, then we have no choice but to resort to software solutions.

Reconnecting the HDD or flash drive to another connector

The reason for incorrect startup of a flash drive or HDD may be incorrect connection of drives or broken connectors. All modern devices have several USB ports and SATA connectors, so it is not difficult to check their serviceability.

HDD RAW can also occur due to failure of the disk or flash drive connectors.

Please note that not all problems can be identified by yourself. In some cases, it makes sense to contact a specialist.

Restoring a RAW disk using chkdsk (checking the disk for errors)

When I started looking for ways to fix the RAW file system on my devices, I very often came across articles that try checking your HDD for errors using built-in Windows tools, the so-called chkdsk utility . I remind you that my operating system is Windows 8.1. There are two ways to run a disk error check: through the graphical interface or using the command line.

I'm trying to run it from graphical mode, I remind you that this is done through the disk properties. I click in the “Disk Management” snap-in on my own and select its properties. On the general tab, my hard drive was displayed as empty, it had a capacity of 0 bytes. Go to the “Service” tab.

Select “Check for errors” and click check. Personally, I immediately got an error window:

The disk cannot be verified because the disk is inaccessible

Let's try to do the same thing, but from the command line. To do this, open a cmd shell as an administrator and enter the command:

chkdsk G: /f (Where G: is the letter of your RAW volume)

The scanning process will begin, if everything is fine, then you should have identified the old file system, in my case, it is NTFS, and the volume label has also been determined, in my case, it is HDD-48 (Movies). Now begins three stages of checking for bad sectors, searching and restoring non-indexed files, and repairing the file table itself.

In my case, after half a minute this gave the result in the form of a restored HDD, now it was NTFS, not RAW type.

If chkdsk for RAW disks is not applicable on your system, then you will receive an error message:

CHKDSK is not valid for RAW disks

Here, for some reason, the operating system was unable to install the previous one, and shows the wrong type. In such cases, the chkdsk utility with the /f key will not help you, but don’t worry, everything can be fixed, we’ll fix it below.

HDD RAW Copy Tool

The HDD RAW Copy Tool utility is designed for sector-by-sector copying of media and allows you to extract all data from the problematic device without data loss. Download the utility from the official application support resource. Install and launch the HDD RAW Copy Tool and wait until the partitions detected on the PC appear in the main frame. We select the problematic device from which we will subsequently recover information (a file system defined as RAW has appeared on it).

Click “Continue”. We specify the file type as *.img to create an image of the recoverable disk. Here it should be taken into account that when specifying the image storage path where all the files from the RAW disk will fit, there must be more free space than the volume/drive itself that we will copy.

We return to the HDD RAW Copy Tool interface, where we click “Continue” again.

After this, you can safely open the generated image through a data recovery program that supports working with images, for example, R-Studio, and begin restoring the necessary data, and format the just copied media to NTFS. We will not describe how to recover data from an image due to the large amount of information, which will be enough for another similar article. On this HDD RAW Copy Tool you can close it.

Recovering a RAW disk when the system does not boot

There are situations when you cannot run a disk error check because your Windows operating system does not boot. It goes a long way, the recent error 0xc0000098 or whea uncorrectable error can be listed for a very long time. In each of these cases, we have developed an algorithm:

• If you are my regular guest and subscriber, then you have probably seen my publication on how to return the “Last Known Good Configuration” item, from which it is easy to resuscitate the system, but by default this option is not enabled.
• The next step was to launch the command line, but from Windows recovery mode , which can be launched via F8 at startup, or from a bootable flash drive, which you should have; if not, then do it for 5 minutes, if you have, of course, another computer. Don't forget to configure booting into the BIOS from a flash drive. When you see the language selection window, press the Shift and F10 keys at the same time to open the Command Prompt.

If it doesn’t work, then click next and on the installation window, click the “System Restore” link in the left corner

Among the additional parameters, you can also find a command line item.

First of all, we need to calculate the drive letter, since here it may differ

diskpart (Press Enter) list volume (Look at the list of partitions)

exit (To exit diskpart)

Next we do chkdsk C: /f

If everything is fine, then you will successfully restore the system disk, but if you suffer the same fate as the message “CHKDSK is not valid for RAW disks,” then do not rush to get upset and this can be fixed.

Before the next manipulations, I advise you to practice using future utilities by creating RAW disks in a test environment in a virtual machine, as I have already described how to do this

No access to cmd?

The situations are completely different: if Windows does not boot, then there is no access to the command line. Naturally, there is no way to run Check Disk utilities with SFC.

1. Use live discs on CD/DVD/flash drive.
2. Use a boot disk or flash drive to restore NTFS:

• In the BIOS, set to boot from the appropriate media and save the settings. To do this, go to the BIOS during boot (press F2 or DEL - it says at the bottom of the screen), select the Boot section using the arrows on the keyboard and select a new boot device;

• while booting from external boot media – select “System Restore” → “Advanced Options” → “Command Prompt” → specify the correct RAW drive letter.

To avoid errors, use the DiskPart utility:

• in cmd without quotes enter “diskpart” → [enter];

• then enter “list disk” → [enter] - displays a complete list of physical disks;

• command “list volume” → [enter] – displays all volumes with partitions of hard and logical drives, and accordingly the letter name.

After rebooting, do not forget to return the boot device - install the system disk.

If you have a desktop PC, you can disconnect the hard drive and connect it to another and run the scan from a different operating system.

Easily format a disk or RAW partition when there is no important data on it

Before I move on to the description of more advanced methods, I want to tell you that if you do not have important data on a flash drive or hard drive that is in the RAW state, then you can generally quickly format everything and return it to working condition, as I remind you , RAW state is most often that the system cannot find the previous file system on the media. Open the Disk Management snap-in, I remind you, press WIN and R at the same time and write diskmgmt.msc there. In the snap-in, find your RAW disk that needs to be fixed and converted to NTFS. Right-click on it and select “Format” from the context menu.

We specify the NTFS file system type and correct the RAW format on your media.

We agree that all data will be destroyed, since in this case it is not significant for you.

As you can see, this method is the easiest to fix HDD RAW format.

If, when you try to format, the “Format” option is inactive, then in this case you will need to delete the partition.

When the partition is deleted, your disk will be in an unpartitioned state. Right-click and select “Create simple volume”

Select the volume size.

Specify the letter for the section.

And set the file system type to NTFS.

As a result, we received a corrected HDD or flash drive in the form of NTFS, and not the notorious RAW.

Check Disk will help with NTFS

Checks hard drives and removable media for bugs in the file system with further correction. In some cases, this will help return the PC to working condition. Launch cmd with elevated privileges:

• right mouse button (hereinafter referred to as RMB) “Start” → “Command Prompt (Administrator)”;

• enter “cmd”;

• “chkdsk _F_: /f” → press [enter], _F_: - in this case, the drive letter with the RAW file system, and _/f_ - indicates that the disk needs to be checked and errors corrected;

• the result may be different, the utility may return NTFS - the result is as in the screenshot.

• Or it may display a message stating that it does not support the RAW file system - screenshot below.

• If restoring the NTFS file system from RAW without data loss failed, proceed to checking the integrity of the sys files. SFC
• Go to cmd with elevated privileges to enter the command. Preserve the syntax. “sfc /scannow” → [enter];

• Windows will issue a warning about the possible duration of the process;

• As a result of the check, Windows will return a response.

  
  The check will show errors/absence thereof.