How to fix "The type of the filesystem is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives"

If you try to use CHKDSK on the RAW drive, it means that you need to get access to the data stored on the disk. Most likely the disk was formatted to NTFS and then something went wrong (plug/unplug problem for USB-connected disks, logical problem or formatting a disk by mistake) resulting in RAW filesystem issue.

CHKDSK is a built-in Windows tool to repair failed volumes. However, there should be at least valid NTFS/FAT boot sectors on the drive along with main filesystem metadata records. CHKDSK can repair a certain amount of, for example, inconsistent MFT records but it fails in the case when, for example, NTFS boot sector is severely damaged or there are no main MFT record at the area where it should be according to the NTFS boot data.

The solution to the RAW filesystem issue is to use NTFS/FAT data recovery software. Such tools can read the filesystem metadata on the disk and, based on it, extract files and folders in a way they were on the disk before the failure. Refer here for the detailed instructions on how to recover data in case of CHKDSK failure on the RAW drive.

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