How to recover files from RAW flash drive/partition?

What is "RAW" drive partition?

The term RAW disk refers to the accessing of the data on a hard drive disk (HDD) or other disk storage device or media directly at the individual byte level instead of through its file system as is usually done. Users cannot access the files on the RAW disk and if a disk reads as RAW in Windows, possible (but not all) symptoms are:

Invalid media type reading drive.
Abort, Retry, Fail?

File system is displayed as "RAW".

Windows may ask if you want to format the drive, such as warning "disk not formatted. Do you want to format now?" As the follow picture.

File names contain "weird" characters.

"Sector not found" messages.

Flash drive partition is more likely to become RAW, as power supply, drive interface error and other reasons could cause flash drive become RAW easily.

Flash drive RAW recovery attentions

Firstly, in some situations it may be technically possible to recover a RAW disk. Format may solve your RAW disk problem and let you access the disk again, but all the important files on the RAW flash disk will be lost. Although data may be recoverable, it will be more difficult and recovers fewer files after you formatted the RAW partition. So when you encounter this problem, don't format the RAW partition. You'd better recover files from it first, and then format the RAW drive/partition to access it.

Secondly, if you have formatted the RAW partition, don't write any files to this partition again, as it may make files corrupted and cannot be recovered again.

How to do flash drive RAW recovery?

To do flash drive RAW recovery, please first download the data recovery software from our website and install it on your computer.

1. Select "Complete Recovery" module on the main window of Data Recovery Wizard.

2. Select the file types you want to recover. Tick 'Search all lost files automatically' to find all lost file types. Tick 'Ignore bad sectors' to skip bad sectors when scanning.

3. Select the Raw disk from the list of logic volumes to scan and click "NEXT".

4. Select the files or folders that you want to recover and press the "Next" button.

5. Select the files to save.

After these steps, you will successfully do flash drive RAW recovery and then take it easy to format the RAW drive. By this way, the RAW trouble has been blown over, and everything is back to normal.

If you are running Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) & 10.6 (Snow Leopard) & 10.5 (Leopard), please go to see EaseUS Mac data recovery software.

 

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