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WD Element 500G external USB drive The drive is 1.5 years old and was formated in NTFS. Now I am unable to mount the drive which acts as if it turning itself on and of. Unable to see files on drive. In properties all parematers such as file space and free space are 0. The file sytem is now RAW. How can I bring this back to NTFS without formatting and loosing my information? How can I prevent this from happening again? What is the root cause?
A RAW file system defines a situation when your operating system fails to recognize the associated volume because the file system extension has been deleted. The system cannot access data from such partitions. When Windows reports this error, it could be because you haven’t initialized the partition, haven’t formatted the drive or you are trying to access a partition that is corrupt. In such situations, various errors may come up. As a solution to this problem, you may need to reformat the drive provided a good backup is available. If not, it is highly recommended to use a third-party partition recovery utility I.e. a computer software data recovery program.
