When we talk about a RAW drive we usually mean a drive that is inaccessible and cannot be opened. In Windows attempts to open such a drive end with the following messages:

While such a situation may seem dangerous at first glance, in reality it does not necessarily have to be. Often, the data on the disk can be recovered in its entirety and can be done using StrongRecovery.

Why does the disk become RAW?

The reasons for this state of affairs may be different and are most often related to incorrect information about the disk in the file system. The user does not have to contribute to this state of affairs. A small change of data in critical places is enough for the system to stop seeing the disk and therefore have no access to it.

Formatting such a disk should of course not be done, because such an operation introduces additional changes that will not restore the data in any way and will only provide access to the "empty"/formatted disk.

Although the system's suggestion regarding formatting may seem innocent, it is actually quite dangerous, especially when it comes to media whose default file system is FAT (FAT32, EXFTAT). Such media include: SD/microSD cards, Flash drives. As a result of formatting in FAT, the tables may be erased, which will later make it difficult to recover larger files (the data of which is not arranged in one sequence). The situation is different with NTFS drives and there the consequences are not so far-reaching (quick format). However, it should be noted that format itself does not give us access to the data that we would like to recover, so formatting in this case is pointless and sometimes only introduces additional confusion or makes data recovery more difficult.

StrongRecovery will allow you to recover data from a RAW drive quickly and easily, all you need to do is run the program, select the drive and then recover the data of interest.