Your USB drive becomes RAW format? Then you can check out the 3 methods listed here to finish USB RAW file system repair easily in Windows computer.
By
Emily
/ Last Updated September 27, 2023
“Several months ago, I bought a Patriot USB flash drive to store photos and videos of my family. It works great all the time. But, yesterday, when I inserted it to my computer as usual, the Windows 11 only showed an error message “disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?”. It was somehow in RAW file system and I can't access any files on it. What happened and why? Any feasible USB RAW file system repair solutions? I don’t want to lose any precious photos and videos. Thanks!”
RAW file system is not a standard file system. It cannot be recognized by Windows 11/10 operating system like FAT file system and NTFS file system. No matter the memory card, computer hard drive or other USB drives show RAW file system, you will be unable to access the data inside. As for the possible causes, apart from the virus/malware attack, power outage, unplugging USB without selecting "safely remove hardware and eject media" option, you should also consider the following factors:
1. Bad Sectors
If the key area of the hard drive contains some bad sectors, the hard drive won’t work normally, and probably becomes RAW file system.
2. Partition Table Corruption
If the partition table of the drive is corrupted, the hard drive may also become raw drive.
3. File System Structural Damage
If the file system suffers structural damage, hard disk partition may change into raw format.
Now comes the most important part: how to repair USB RAW file system in Windows 11/10/8/7? Below are 3 effective solutions you can try. However, in order to repair RAW USB without losing data, you had better recover the data from the raw USB first and back up them to another location. Recoverit Pro is a reliable data recovery software you can rely on.
When it comes to checking whether there are some bad sectors on the raw USB drive, running CHKDSK probably is the first thing coming into your mind. But it is, in my experience, unreliable sometimes. For example, you might meet an error message: The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
Therefore, here we recommended a free partition manager for this task: AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It can help you to check disk error in a few clicks instead of running complex commands. Windows 11/7/8/8.1/10/XP/Vista are supported. Next is how to check bad sectors on hard disk via this software in Windows 11/10.
Step 1. Download the freeware, install and run it to enter its main interface. Click “Test” in the top toolbar, and choose “Disk Surface Test”.
Step 2. Tick on Quick Check and then Start.
A partition table is a table maintained on disk by the OS describing the partitions on that disk. This term is most associated with the MBR partition table. If the MBR partition table is damaged or corrupt, then the hard drive might become RAW and the system will be unable to locate the partition to boot from and the boot process will be halted. To repair the corrupted partition table, especially the MBR partition table, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard can also help.
Step 1. Launch the freeware. Right click the RAW USB to select Rebuild MBR.
Step 2. Choose a proper type of MBR for your current operating system and click OK.
Step 3. Click Apply->Proceed to begin rebuilding the master boot record.
If the above methods do not make any difference, formatting it to a regular file system, like NTFS, FAT 32 or exFAT is a guaranteed USB RAW file system repair solution. More importantly, you can also use AOMEI Partition Assistant for this task.
Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right click the raw USB drive and select Format Partition from the menu.
Step 2. Choose NTFS from the File System tab and click OK.
Step 3. Click Apply to execute the pending operation.
As you can see, AOMEI Partition Assistant is the powerful software and provides several USB RAW file system repair ways, and each one is easy to understand and follow, even for the computer newbies. Besides, if you upgrade it to AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro version to unlock more amazing features like recovering deleted partition on USB/SSD/HDD, migrating only OS drive to SSD, allocating free space from one partition and you can use this tool to recover your lost data after formatting.
Last but not least, we prepare some tips you can take a look at to avoid hard disk RAW issue in future.
▂Don’t remove your disk from computers in an improper way. Always remember to choose “safely remove hardware and eject media” option.
▂Better to make a disk backup, which could help you recover the data easily when the disk suddenly turns into raw and then you can format it without any worries.
▂Never format too much of your hard disk.
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