A RAW file system defines a situation when your operating system fails to recognize the associated volume because the file system extension has been deleted. The system cannot access data from such partitions. When Windows reports this error, it could be because you haven't initialized the partition, haven't formatted the drive or you are trying to access a partition that is corrupt. In such situations, various errors may appear, the most common being is discussed further. As a solution to this problem, you may need to reformat the drive provided a good backup is available. If not, it is highly recommended to use a third-party partition recovery utility.

When the drive is damaged, it looks like as if it has lost its file system type, reporting an error such as below:

“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/”

This error occurs even when the drive has been properly initialized and formatted. Runnning chkdsk on the same drive gives the following error message:

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

The stored data is completely inaccessible.

Cause

The file system type is defined at least two different locations: partition table (or LDM in case of dynamic disks) or volume boot sector. The above situation can occur in one of the following possibilities:

Both volume boot sector and partition table possess incorrect file system type information The file system type information contained at these two locations contradict with each other Neither of the two locations contain the correct file system type information

These conditions arise when the partition table, volume boot sector and/or LDM database is corrupt. In NTFS volumes, damage to MFT can also cause this behavior.

Solution

Check for the latest backup you have and restore your data if it fulfills your requirements. Later, you can reformat the drive to solve the error.

In case when no valid backup is available, Windows Partition Recovery utilities can work. The partition recovery utilities are highly competent tools, equipped with graphically rich features, that can recover lost data from corrupt, lost, inaccessible or formatted disk partitions.

Partition Recovery Softwareis a reliable solution for recovering lost partition information from Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000 run systems. The comprehensive Windows Partition Recovery tool provide you a self-descriptive interface and is quite easy-to-install. The tool supports FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file systems.