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How to Resolve CHKDSK Error File System is Raw

Sometimes users have trouble accessing a drive on their system and may encounter a message 'The drive is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?' But formatting is not a solution here since formatting a drive means lose all the data, thus many users run Check Disk so as to solve the problem. Even CHKDSK is unable to resolve it & gives an error message 'The type of the file system is raw. CHKDSK is not available for raw drives'. This post will give a solution for the CHKDSK error 'file system is raw'.

An Overview of a Raw Drive

A drive is called raw when it has not been formatted yet by any of the file system FAT, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS. A raw drive doesn't contain files & folders since a drive must be formatted before storing the data. Besides, a drive can become raw when the file system gets corrupted.

Why CHKDSK Reports Raw File System

A drive becomes raw when Windows operating system stop recognizing its file system even though the file system exists in a hard disk. Hence, the data that resides in a raw drive become inaccessible. Moreover, if the disk is severely damaged or corrupted then it is impossible to repair it even using CHKDSK utility.
There are many reasons why disk becomes raw such as virus infection, sudden power failure, corrupt MBR or partition table, application malfunction, bad sectors in a hard disk, malware injection etc. When the file system cannot be repaired then CHKDSK gives the error 'The type of the file system is raw. CHKDSK is not available for raw drives' as shown below.

chkdsk error file system is raw

How to Restore Data From Raw Drives

When Check disk reports 'CHKDSK is not available for raw drives' , it doesn't mean that your data has been lost. Instead, it is still stored in the hard disk but the only problem here is operating system does not allow you to access the data as the disk has been extremely damaged. It is recommended not to format the disk as it results in data loss. In order to fix CHKDSK error 'The type of the file system is raw', you are required to use a tool CHKDSK file recovery that will recover a raw file system from external hard drive, windows 8, 7, XP etc.