How to create a RAW partition on a HDD?

[Jacob_40]

Last week I fixed someone's external HDD when an error occurred saying that the drive needed to be formatted. In Disk Management the HDD was appearing as "RAW". I used Test Disk Utility to locate and recover the partition. I was wondering if there is any way to create a RAW partition for practising Test Disk Utility.

Many thanks

 

[JaredDM]

Just to clarify RAW isn't a filesystem type. It's just what it shows when it can't detect the file system. It's what a blank drive will show or one where the beginning of the partition/drive is erased, unreadable, etc. Usually when a drive is suddenly showing as "RAW" it's due to a hardware issue preventing the drive from reading, or bad sectors near the beginning of the drive.

If you want to make a drive appear as RAW all you need to do is delete the partition table (sector 0) in HEX. If you want to make a partition appear as RAW, just create it then erase the beginning few sectors of the partition.

 

[Jacob_40]

Thank you! Would you recommend Test Disk Utility as a good way of recovering RAW drives?

 

[adinabel02]

Hi Jacob, there is no doubt that test disk tool is good for raw partition recovery but it is not successful in all circumstances. Sometimes test disk unable to detect hard drive bad sectors and incapable to recover data from raw partition. Mostly users download professional data recovery tool to recover their data from raw partitions.

 

[Jacob_40]

Hi Jacob, there is no doubt that test disk tool is good for raw partition recovery but it is not successful in all circumstances. Sometimes test disk unable to detect hard drive bad sectors and incapable to recover data from raw partition. Mostly users download professional data recovery tool to recover their data from raw partitions.

Hi adinabel02, thank you very much for your reply. Do you have any examples of software that I could use?
Thanks