What does CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives mean?
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Here's the question.
"I'm having a problem with my external drive, so I ran CHK disc F on it.
It gave me an error.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
What? What am I supposed to do?"
This is unfortunately a somewhat common
scenario in the sense that I hear about it from time to time.
What it means is that Windows thinks your drive has no data on it.
Now, that could be accurate, but that could also be a problem.
In order to understand what the thing actually means, we need to talk a little
bit about what it means for a drive to be formatted.
Let's have a quick look in Windows to see
what this looks like in a couple of different ways.
So here we are in Windows home.
I'm going to fire up
the Windows PowerShell in this case Admin version, which is fine.
This will work in command prompt as well.
I happen to have a USB drive attached.
You can see it here.
Usb drive H and in fact, this is going to fail.
It tells me that I need to format the disk drive before it can be used.
This is a symptom of the exact same
problem we'll talk about formatting it a little later.
So if I now try to CHKDSK H,
the error that we're talking about results.
This indicates that the system doesn't think that H has any data on it.
The other thing to do when this happens is
to have a look with the disk management tool, so I'm firing up disk management,
letting it load its disk configuration,
and then eventually it will show us the drives that are attached to this
system, one of which is this removable drive H that has nothing on it.
It has no partition, no format, no nothing.
That's a RAW drive.
That's what a RAW drive means to Windows.
Now I came up with an obscure, rather bizarre metaphor for this,
but bear with me because I think it'll kind of help
when you think about a plot of land,
say, a few acres of land, it has absolutely nothing on it.
You might consider that land to be RAW.
And for purposes of this metaphor, it will be the next thing that happens
in order to be able to actually use that land for housing or whatever is.
You put streets on it.
You put an entryway into the property and you start to lay out some streets.
Those streets can be considered the format of the land.
They can be considered the overhead
information that then allows you to both place and locate housing on that land.
So in a sense, when you format a hard
disk, you are, in a sense, laying out the streets.
You're not putting any houses on the disk.
You're not putting any files on the disk.
But what you're doing is you're laying out
the information that will eventually allow those files to be located.
That's what formatting does.
Now, when a drive is identified as RAW,
for one reason or another, the system can't just find files.
There are no files on the disk.
It can't even find the streets.
It can't even find the overhead
information that would allow it to find the files.
That's a RAW drive.
Now, this can happen, as I said, for either of two reasons.
The first reason is that, yeah, the drive is empty.
Maybe it's just brand new.
Maybe you've done something to it.
But the bottom line is that the drive has no data.
The solution here is
really fairly simple format the drive like we saw earlier, windows File Explorer
suggested that as the alternative as the thing to do.
When it identified a RAW drive
format the drive and it won't be RAW anymore, you'll be able to put data on it.
Okay. The more problematic scenario is what if
you believe that that disk should have data?
What if you believe that there actually is
data on that disk, and yet it's being reported as RAW?
That's a problem.
It could potentially be a catastrophic problem.
Here are the things that I would try.
First, I would try reconnecting that drive
using a different USB slot, plug it into a different USB slot right away.
Sometimes if the problem is with the USB
connection in that slot, the problem will go away.
In that same vein, try a different USB cable.
If it is a cabled, external device.
Sometimes cables wear out, they break.
Something goes wrong.
It can manifest this way.
You might also try connecting the drive to a different computer entirely.
That way, any problem on the first computer can be identified as being
a problem with that computer and not your drive.
You can then get your data off your drive using that other computer and then
diagnose the problem on the first computer separately.
You can, in some cases, try using a different enclosure.
If it's an external hard drive that is
encased in an enclosure of some sort like you might put an internal drive into,
sometimes those can go bad, and all it really is is the circuit board
in them that is converting from the Drive's native interface to USB.
They're not expensive, and it's not that difficult to move a hard
drive from one of these enclosures to another.
It's rare. I'll call it.
It's not something I would have you do
immediately, but it is something you could add to your list of diagnostic tools.
If this turns out to be a situation where you really need the data off that drive.
In that same vein, you can try data recovery tools.
In other words,
while the drive is connected as we've connected our H drive here,
there are tools you might be able to use on that drive to try and examine the RAW
data that's on that drive and try and recover any data that might be present.
Unusual for this to work.
It's uncommon for this to work.
But again, it's another tool in the toolbox.
If this is really important, and finally, if it is really important,
if this is a situation where the drive really is supposed to have data that you
desperately need, you may need to enlist the services of a data recovery company.
This will cost you money.
This is not a cheap solution,
but it's the last ditch in getting the data off the drive.
If it's at all possible now,
I have to say I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention backing up.
If you care about the data that's on that drive.
If that drive failed and that was the only copy of the data, you weren't backed up.
If that data existed only on that drive and that drive failed,
for whatever reason, you are actually looking
at the possibility of losing that data permanently, drives can fail and fail
in ways that are not recoverable, make sure that even if the data is
on an external drive, even if you call that external drive
a backup drive, make sure that the data is backed up.
Make sure that the data exists in the more than one place, so that when this happens
because it will, it becomes an annoyance rather than a catastrophe.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
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