How to recover files when "Chkdsk is not available for FAT/NTFS RAW drives"?

Chkdsk is not available for RAW drives error

Sometimes a damaged volume may look like it lost its file system type. Various error messages may appear, most common being.

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.

Also a CHKDSK tool will complain that it is unable to perform a RAW file system recovery.

The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

A case of a customer:

Hi guys,

Hope you can help, this has been driving me nuts for some time now.

Not quite sure what triggered this issue but I have recently been unable to access (play media or music, delete, modify) any files on my internal SATA slave drive (B :\). Everything seems to work ok on the internal primary drive (C :\). Recent files are held on C:\, and then transferred to B:\ for archiving, back-up or when C:\ is running low on space.

I read somewhere that perhaps the permissions or User Controls have been messed up. I disabled User Account Control in Vista and tried to modify permissions, as they were not the same as the directories permissions on the C:\ drive. It worked for most files, but some are still inaccessible, I get the I/O error.

I tried to run a chkdsk on B:\ and get the error "Chkdsk is not available for RAW drives"

But the drives are both listed as NTFS in the Disk Management System.

Any thoughts on how to get the disk working again, or recover the existing data? As it stands I cannot even copy files to C:\ to try and recover them.

Free data recovery software to recover data when chkdsk is not available

We would like to recommend a free data recovery software - Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition to recover data when such problem occurs. EaseUS data recovery software will in most cases handle such a situation pretty well. It solves all data loss problems - recover files emptied from Recycle Bin, or lost due to software crash, formatted or damaged hard drive, virus attack, lost partition and other unknown reasons under Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7.

Although it is a full-functional data recovery software, it can recover 1 GB files for free after you free download this data recovery software and install it.

How to recover data when chkdsk is not available?

1. Click the "Complete Recovery" button on the main window of Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition.

EaseUS free data recovery software

2. Select the file typs you want to recover and then the second screen on the "Complete Recovery" tool will display a list of file types. After choosing the file types, you will see a list of volumes found on the drives in your system. If the volume does not have a drive letter, then the volume will be listed at the hindmost and the drive letter will be instead by "*".

3. You should choose the volume that you want to recover data and click "NEXT" to start searching on this volume.

4. The Intelligent Searching module will scan on the selected volume, collect and analyze every byte on the volume.

5. After this scanning is finished, you will see file/folder tree very soon.

6. Select the file or directory that you want to recover and press the "Next" button.

7. Select a directory and then save the data.

EaseUS Data Recovery Free Edition can also help you unformat files, recover lost word files, recover deleted, missing or lost logical drives, recover files after reinstalling Windows, etc.

If you are seeking for Mac data recovery software, please go to see EaseUS Mac Data Recovery Wizard.

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