How do I fix NTFS RAW

It depends on what type of "fix" is needed which in turn depends on the situation resulted in the RAW drive. If it is a brand new disk or a used one but you do not need the previous data stored on it, and you just want Windows to recognize the disk and let you store new data on it, you need to format the disk to NTFS, assign a drive letter to it and that’s all.

  1. Press Win + R
  2. Type in diskmgmt.msc
  3. Navigate to your disk in the list of available drives. It is possible that your disk will not have a drive letter but will be displayed as having RAW filesystem.
  4. Right-click on it and select Format
  5. Just click OK, OK to apply all the default settings. Make sure the drive letter is assigned at a certain stage of formatting.
  6. Open the Windows Explorer and start using your disk.

Read the illustrated guide on how to format a RAW disk in Windows.


If you need to get access to the data previously stored on the disk, you SHOULD NOT format the disk. The only safe (read-only) option you have is to try data recovery software, which can recover data from the filesystem used on the disk. The data recovery software can read corrupted NTFS filesystem metadata and extract files and folders. Read here for the detailed instructions on how to use data recovery software to recover data from a RAW drive. After data recovery, you can format the RAW drive as described above and start using it to store new data.

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