How to Recover Data from RAW External Hard Drive?

Updated on January 28, 2020

Whether it is computer's internal or external hard drive, it can get corrupt and turn RAW any time. Usually, external hard disk drives turns RAW due to various reasons that includes malware infections, system crash, file system corruption, etc. External hard drive when turns RAW means that the logical volume with an undefined or unsupported file system. With no recognized file system, a RAW external hard drive becomes inaccessible - neither you can access your data nor u can use the drive to store any new data. In such circumstance, how to fix the issue, and recover data from RAW external hard drive? Don't worry! Continue reading to know the solution..!

Hey, don’t worry. When external hard drive becomes RAW, it displays the disk space as 0 bytes and the worst part is it won’t allow you to access data from it. RAW external hard drive is state where the computer fails to recognize the file system of the external hard disk. Usually when the file system get corrupted or damaged, then external hard drive becomes RAW making its data inaccessible or unreadable.

Symptoms of RAW external hard drive:

• File system of external hard disk is displayed as “RAW”
• File names contain “weird” characters
• Windows shows “This drive in disk not formatted. Do you want to format know?” error message

The main reasons for external hard drive to become RAW are:

• Severe virus/malware infection on external hard disk file system
• Damaged Master Boot Record or Partition Table corruption on external hard drive
• Power failure or improper system termination while accessing the data from portable hard drive
• Interruptions while formatting or reformatting the external hard disk

What should we do to deal with the RAW external hard drive? All the problems hold back us to access the external hard drive. As per expert’s advice, do not make any changes in the drive before you try to recover files from external hard drive. The CHKDSK tool will not help you at this time and formatting the external hard disk makes it accessible again but wipes out its entire data. The data recovery software is what we need at this situation to restore data from the RAW external hard drive.

Yodot Hard Drive Recovery - Free Tool to Recover Files from RAW external Hard Drive:

Yodot Hard Drive Recovery is the best data recovery tool that helps to retrieve data from RAW external hard drive. The tool successfully retrieves data from external hard drive after formatting or reformatting the external hard drive for several times. It has the advanced scanning technology which scans the entire drive part-by-part and restores all recoverable data from external hard drive. This program can locate lost, formatted or corrupted FAT or NTFS partitions on external hard drive and recover data from them. Moreover, you can restore data from computer hard drives, USB flash drives, iPods, memory cards and others portable devices on Windows OS.

Detailed Procedure to Recover Data from RAW External Hard Drive:

• Connect your RAW external hard drive to the computer though USB port
• Download and install Yodot Hard Drive Recovery software to external hard drive connected Windows PC
• Run the application to begin the recovery process and follow the recovery steps present on screen
• The software displays two options in the main screen. i.e., ”Partition Recovery” and “Formatted  / Reformatted Recovery”
• Select “Formatted  / Reformatted Recovery”  option to recover data from RAW external hard drive
• The application will scan and display all the physical or logical drives present in system including your RAW external hard drive
• Choose the particular drive from which you need to recover data and press ”Next” button
• In next wizard,  you can see a list of different file types from which either you can select particular file type or simply click on “Skip” option to choose all file types by default
• After scanning process is completed, the application will display all recovered data from your RAW external hard drive
• View the data in two types of view. i.e., “Data View” Or “File Type View”
• Select the data that you want to recover and save them to your desired destination location

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