Disk Management

How to Convert Raw Drive to NTFS Without Data Loss in Windows 7/8/10

While trying to access a partition in a hard drive or a removable disk such as USB flash drive or SD card, you may notice that the partition or the removable disk is not accessible. If check more detailed information in the Disk Management, you will find the file system becomes RAW. The RAW file system is not a Windows recognized file system. You will just receive the error message” the type of the file system is RAW, chkdsk is not available for raw drives” even if you run the chkdsk.exe program to check and fix the RAW file system.

How to Convert Raw Drive to NTFS Without Data Loss

Why Need to Convert RAW Drive to NTFS?

Generally speaking, there are various reasons for a hard disk became a RAW drive. The possible causes that result in Windows RAW drive are partition table damage, bad sectors, virus attack, system reinstallation, file system structural damage and hard disk drive cable problem. Due to the corrupt RAW file system, you can’t access and find the data on your hard drive. Since you can’t read and write the RAW disk, the only way to solve the issue is to convert the RAW file system to those file systems Windows can be recognized, such as NTFS and FAT. NTFS is the most recommended file system because it is more potent than FAT in areas such as data security, data consistency and writing and retrieving speed.

Check: How to RECOVER A DELETED FILE OR FOLDER ON WINDOWS

How to Convert RAW Drive to NTFS in Windows 7/8/10?

For all above reasons leading to RAW hard drive issue, there are several ways to convert the RAW hard disk to NTFS file system. Here in this post introduces three methods and you can choose the one you like.

 

Solution 1: Covert RAW Drive to NTFS Formatting with Disk Management

Covert RAW Drive to NTFS

  1. Open the Disk Management in Windows by type ”diskmgmt.msc” in the Run box.
  2. Right-click the drive needs formatting and select “Format” from the drop-down menu.
  3. Select “NTFS” in the “File system” line and then choose “Quick format.”
  4. Click “OK” to start to format.

Windows’ own built-in disk management utility allows you to control partitions and disks. Usually, you can convert RAW drive to NTFS by formatting the hard disk. However, you may fail with formatting using disk management tool, for example, the “the format did not complete successfully” error message.

 

Solution 2: Covert RAW Drive to NTFS With Free Partition Manager Software

If you fail to convert RAW to NTFS with disk management, some third-party partition software, like AOMEI Partition Assistant could format the RAW drive to NTFS in Windows 7/8/ ten safely and quickly. It provides many practical features relating disk management, such as resize partition, convert disks between GPT and MBR, migrate os to SSD.

  1. Download the freeware, install and launch it;
  2. In the primary interface, right-click the RAW partition and select “Format Partition”;
  3. Set a partition label, choose NTFS as file system and click OK to start format partition;
  4. The final step is to click Apply to execute this operation.

You can solve the hard drive issue to NTFS by using the above ways usually. Here are many other kinds of partition software in the market as well, here I list AOMEI Partition Assistant is all for its free. You can choose the most one you like.