However, if there are errors in the partition information of the USB devices, your system fails to recognize them and considers them to have a RAW file system. In such cases, you can’t open the drive. Additionally, even trying to run CHKDSK on the drive shows the error message “The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.” In such cases, you need to convert the file system to an appropriate one to resolve the issue. However, it is also possible that your system is mistaking some uncommon file systems such as ReFS as RAW, which require other solutions.
Causes of “Type of File System Is Raw”
How to Fix “Type of File System Is Raw” on Windows?
Before you begin, try recovering the contents of the USB drive using some recovery software to account for any data losses. After that, follow the potential solutions below to resolve your issue.
Corruption of disk sectors.Physical damage on the drive.Malware affecting the partition information.Abrupt power failures while formatting disk.
Install January 17 2022 Out-of-band Update
On January 11 2022, Windows released updates that also introduced some minor bugs in Windows. Your system will either fail to mount a removable drive with the Resilient File System (ReFS) or mounts it as RAW, leading to this issue. The January 17 2022 out-of-band update resolves the issue, so you need to download and install it to fix your problem. However, one thing you should note is that the patch only works for ReFS 2 and later versions. Microsoft discontinued the support for ReFS 1.x in February 2022. So if your drive uses such file format, the only option you have to open it on Windows is by rolling back your system by uninstalling the corresponding updates. You can search the internet for which update to uninstall. Alternatively, you can back up the drive on another computer with an earlier Windows version and format it with a supported file format.
Format External Drive
If your external drive doesn’t have a Resilient File System, the only way to resolve the issue is by formatting the drive and converting it to a supported file format. There are many ways to do so but we have included the steps for using the Diskpart command line (CLI) for the process. If this method fails, you need to clear all formatting information from the drive and format it again. To do so, open the Diskpart CLI and enter the following commands while replacing the necessary components:
list diskselect disk #list volumeselect volume #cleancreate partition primaryformat fs=fat32 quick
If you can’t format the drive or formatting also doesn’t make it accessible, the drive is likely failing. You need to replace it with a functional one in such a scenario.
