What should I do if the USB drive is changed to RAW format and cannot be formatted?
When we use a USB drive, we sometimes encounter situations where the RAW format of the USB drive cannot be formatted. When the USB drive is changed to RAW format, whether you double-click or right-click to open the USB drive, the Windows system will prompt that the format cannot be completed. What should I do if I encounter a RAW formatted USB drive that cannot be formatted?
USB
Before starting formatting, you need to understand what RAW format is. RAW format is an unprocessed, uncompressed format. If the USB drive is changed to RAW format, you will not be able to access the data in the USB drive and will also face the risk of data loss.
Generally, the conversion of a USB drive to RAW format is due to incorrect removal of the USB drive, damage to the USB drive that cannot be read correctly, or viruses in the USB drive. Before formatting the USB drive, you can use the USB repair tool to repair the USB drive or use antivirus software to disinfect the USB drive. If you still cannot solve the problem of RAW format failure on the USB drive, you can try the following methods.
✔ Method 1. Command Prompt
If the RAW format of the USB drive cannot be formatted, we can use the CMD command prompt to format the USB drive. It should be noted that this method will delete all data from the USB drive. If you still need data from the USB drive, please backup it to the disk in advance.
- Enter “CMD” in the search box, right-click on “Command Prompt”, and select “Run as administrator”.
- Then, enter the following commands in sequence and press the enter key after each command is completed.
Diskpart
List disk (list all disks)
Select disk # (# is the disk number of a RAW formatted USB drive)
Clean
Create partition primary
Format fs=ntfs (or input: format fs=fat32)
Assign
Diskpart
After the command execution is completed, the USB flash drive RAW can be formatted as an NTFS file system.
✔ Method 2. Disk Management
The built-in disk management tool in the Windows system provides us with functions such as formatting, deleting volumes, and expanding volumes. Changing the USB drive to RAW format will cause the partition table to be lost. In this case, we can use disk management to delete the USB drive partition and then create a new one. This can achieve the purpose of formatting.
- The RAW format of the USB drive cannot be formatted. We can right-click on “This Computer”, select “Management”, and then click “Storage”>”Disk Management”.
- After entering disk management, right-click on the USB partition and select “Delete Volume”.
remove volume
- Then, right-click on the USB drive to create a new disk partition, and follow the instructions to complete it.
✔ Method 3. Format Tool
When encountering RAW format failure on a USB drive, in addition to using the CMD command prompt and Windows disk management, you can also use third-party formatting tools to format the USB drive. Here, we will use the Aomei Partition Assistant to format RAW formatted USB drives into the FAT32 file system. The specific operation steps are as follows:
- Download and run the Aomei partition, right-click on the USB partition and select “Format”.
format
- In the pop-up window, set “File System” to “FAT32”, and you can also set “Partition Volume Label” and “Cluster Size” here. After setting, click “OK”.
format
- After returning to the main interface, click “Submit” in the upper left corner of the main interface, and then click “Execute” to apply the pending operation.
implement
If you encounter the problem that the RAW format of a USB drive cannot be formatted, you can try the above three methods to format the USB drive. However, it should be noted that all three formatting methods will delete all data on the USB drive. If you do not want to format a RAW formatted USB drive, you can perform data recovery on the USB drive to recover lost partitions
