RAW Hard Drive Recovery on Windows 7

Recently my girlfriend's laptop and mine are dead, and I bought a new external hard drive to copy data from our old hard drives. When I rescue data from my hard drive, it shows my hard drive is in RAW format through Disk Management. How to recover files on my hard drive and fix the issue?

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Dany· Answered on Jan 16, 2024

Your hard drive becoming RAW format means it has not been formatted with an appropriate file system, such as NTFS or FAT32, and the information on it is still unavailable. That is why you cannot copy data from this old hard drive to your new external hard drive. If you don't know what to do when hard drive is in RAW format, you can check the following tips to fix the RAW hard drive and recover data from this hard drive:

1. You can attempt to repair the RAW hard drive without formatting using Command Prompt if your old hard drive displays in RAW format but still has a drive letter. Some users may think the CHKDSK command is useless for RAW hard drives, but you can repair your RAW hard drive with a drive letter. The command is chkdsk x: /f (You should replace x with the exact hard drive letter). 

2. The second method is formatting your RAW hard drive to NTFS format. This is the most straightforward solution to fix a RAW hard drive. With a data recovery tool, you can convert RAW format to NTFS without losing data.

After formatting the RAW hard drive to NTFS, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard can recover the lost files. By the way, this recovery tool can also recover data from RAW hard drives and RAW partitions, so you can use this tool before fixing the RAW hard drive. All the recoverable personal files will show up after hard drive scanning. If some files are corrupted, this program will help you repair the damaged files.

Use EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to recover deleted or lost files easily and quickly.

Tutorials on how to recover lost, deleted, or formatted data from HDD, SSD, USB, SD card, or other storage media on Windows and Mac.