3 Immediate Steps to Recover Files from RAW Hard Drive

When an external hard drive is connected to a computer, often it starts showing some weird kind activities, like a sudden disappearance of the external hard drive, which was functioning properly before. This situation could arise due to multiple reasons and can leave the external hard drive RAW. A RAW external hard drive makes the complete stored data inaccessible and shows a warning notice to format it for the further use. In such situation, a user might think that he or she has lost his stored data forever.

Major Errors:

• 'The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?'
• •NTFS/FAT File system is displayed as "RAW".
• 'There was an error accessing drive. The disk is not formatted'
• 'Sector not found'
• File names contain "weird" characters.
• 'Invalid media type reading drive. Abort, retry, fail?'

Cause of External hard drive becoming RAW:

• Master Boot Record (MBR) is damaged
• Hardware or software malfunction
• Operation system interruption
• Partition Table of External hard drive is corrupt
• The interrupted process of formatting or reformatting or hard drive re-partitioning
• Virus & malware attack on hard disk file system
• Abrupt system shut down or sudden power failure while accessing data from External hard drive

A RAW hard drive shows the disk space as 0 bytes and worse, once your hard drive become RAW you will not be able to access any data from it. If you want to access this inaccessible data you need to format the hard disk, which will eventually lead to complete data loss situation. However, even then there are chances of internal or external hard drive recoverysoftware from a RAW hard disk. In order to do that, you just need to use a reliable data recovery software. Before discussing about the steps you must know about some good third party data recovery utilities.

PC INSPECTOR Smart Recovery

Additionally, with the help of this utility, you can also rebuild & recover NTFS & FAT boot sector from their backup.

FreeUndelete:

This software is also available free for personal use. Free Undelete is a skilled utility that restores deleted files, from NTFS (1.0 and 2.0), FAT32, FAT16 or FAT12
based file systems. This recovery tool saves recovered files into a new user specified location to prevent overwriting of deleted files on the original storage
media. However, for business environment the purchase of the software is
mandatory. This version will also provide customer support service.


Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery - Professional



Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery software is a powerful partition recovery tool, which can recover lost, deleted, or inaccessible data on NTFS based internal & external drives. This tool offers dedicated module (Advanced recovery) that allow RAW data recovery from an external & internal hard drive, CDs and DVDs, etc.

Its advanced recovery option has the ability to recover completely lost data from a RAW hard drive without modifying it. This is the most recommended product due to its accuracy and reliability. Its 'Raw Recovery' feature recovers severely corrupt media flawlessly including multiple file types, such as documents, photos, and multimedia files.