Microsoft Windows operating system allows you to divide your computer hard drive into various partitions, for effective management of your data and improve system performance. It is essential to format the hard drive partition using any file system. Windows supports NTFS (New Technology File System) and FAT (File Allocation Table) file systems. However, in some situations, the Windows hard drive becomes RAW if the file system gets damaged and you come across severe file loss situations. You can not retrieve your valuable data from the Windows hard drive in such situations and come across critical error messages. At this point of your, you must have a complete backup to restore files from. However, if backup is not available, file recovery software becomes need of hour.

In a practical scenario of this problem, you may find that your Windows hard drive partition behaves like RAW. When you try to fix this problem using Chkdsk utility, you may come across the below error message:

“The volume X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? The disk in drive X: is not formatted. There was an error accessing drive X:. The disk is not formatted.”

At the same time, Chkdsk utility may refuse to work on the RAW drive and it gives you further error message stating:

“The type of the filesystem is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.”

Cause of the problem

File system organizes all the data on Windows hard drive. It creates an index of all the files on hard drive and operating system refers this index to locate and access the files. When the file system gets damaged, all these entries are lost and files do not remain organized any more. Thus, you lose access to all the files on your Windows hard drive.

Resolution

In order to fix the RAW hard drive, you need to format it and place a file system on it. However, formatting the hard drive is not a safe method from data point of view. It removes all the files from hard drive and cause serious file loss problems, which eventually needs file recovery to be sorted out.

Windows file recovery applications are capable of recovering lost or deleted files from Windows hard drive in all cases of file loss. The deleted file recovery tools are totally safe and easy to use.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most excellent solution to easily and effectively handle all file loss scenarios. The software is designed for Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000. It retrieves data from all NTFS5, NTFS, FAT 32, VFAT, FAT16, and FAT12 file system partitions.