Fortunately, a free and powerful formatting tool will be introduced for Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, and Vista. Or, it does not work for some RAW drives that caused by serious damage. However, the formatting process takes too much time in a few cases. The RAW hard drive should be changed to NTFS successfully, and you can Change Drive Letter and Paths to assign drive letter in Device Manager as well as resize partition using Diskpart later if you want to. List volume (you should be able to see a NTFS formatted partition) Select disk n (where n is the RAW hard drive)Ĭonvert mbr (or “convert gpt” based on the disk capacity)įormat fs=ntfs label=new quick (you can replace new with another desired name) Type following commands in sequence and each command has an Enter followed by. Press Windows key and R key combination to open Run. If it is a data partition on internal disk, skip this step.Ģ.
Connect the external drive to Windows and make sure it can be detected. Therefore, you need to do more changes before formatting.ġ. You cannot directly format RAW drive by using format H: /FS: NTFS command because chances are that it may fail. In that case, try these two recommended solutions to fix RAW external hard drive to NTFS. If you run CHKDSK on that drive, you’ll get “CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives”. But in some cases, you may encounter such errors when you format a RAW drive, “The format did not complete successfully” in Disk Management and “ Windows was unable to complete the format” in File Explorer. There are many approaches to format a drive in Windows. Please remember to backup hard drive on a regular basis in the future.
If there are important files you need to recover, please turn to professional data recovery software and get data back first.
Note: Following methods will change RAW file system to NTFS by completely formatting it.
How to fix external hard drive from RAW to NTFS in Windows 11/10/8/7? However, it is more important to figure out how to convert RAW hard drive to NTFS or other file systems. Surely, there are other possible reasons that can lead to hard drive partition corruption and change NTFS to RAW. Inappropriate computer behaviors like unplug the drive without rejecting. Virus infection, which breaks file system directly. System error or hard disk error has the same bad effect. As described in the post at the beginning. Generally speaking, following reasons may account for why hard drive switched from NTFS to RAW.įormat suspended. What caused RAW format problem? In fact, the answer depends. The commonly seen symptoms would be: Disk not formatted, the parameter is incorrect, or Sector not found, even though the drive showing up as Local Drive and Healthy in Windows. Say it plainly, that drive is corrupted or lost. Data on that drive cannot be readable because Windows does not know how to access.
Well, what is RAW format hard drive and why it emerges? RAW format hard drive and its possible causesĪ RAW format hard drive refers to a drive has not been formatted to any readable file system such as NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, FAT, Ext2, Ext3, etc. If you run CHKDSK /f on the RAW format drive, chances are that you’ll get this error message: CHKDSK cannot be run on the drive.
Actually, the same problem also happens on portable hard drive, USB hard drive, flash drive and micro SD card, even internal hard drive sometimes. It is a post about external hard drive becomes RAW after unsuccessful formatting. Helpless! Any suggestions on how to fix RAW hard drive to NTFS or other formats that is readable under Windows will be appreciated.” I cancelled it by restarting my computer and the hard drive becomes RAW since then. Around four hours or so, it still shows no progress. Nevertheless, it says it is formatting but there is no % process appear. Initialized to MBR and I started to format the HDD with normal format (not Quick Format). Then I right click the unallocated space to create a new simple volume. In Disk Management I deleted all existing partitions and it shows up as Unallocated.
I connected it to my Windows 7 and it is recognized as usual. “My 320GB WD external hard drive works properly, but I want to delete all partitions there and create a new big one.