Jun 15, 2026 • Filed to: SD Card Solutions • Proven solutions
TL;DR:
To fix an inaccessible RAW SD card, you must first recover your files using specialized software before executing any formatting commands, as the required formatting process will permanently erase all existing data.
● Wondershare Recoverit Data Recovery allows you to extract standard files from the damaged RAW drive, while the Recoverit Ultimate version is specifically recommended for recovering and repairing fragmented or corrupted video files.
● Once your data is safely backed up to another location, Windows users can reformat the SD card to FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS using graphical tools like Windows Explorer and Disk Management, or administrative command-line utilities including DiskPart and PowerShell.
● Continuing to use the repaired SD card after formatting is strongly discouraged, as a drive that has already suffered file system corruption will almost always corrupt your data again.
Ask AI for a summary
If your SD card is being detected as having the RAW format, its file system has been damaged. None of your devices will be able to read or write any data on it unless you perform a "format RAW SD card" procedure or RAW SD card recovery. While you can use a variety of methods to fix your RAW SD by formatting it, the process will erase all your data. It's also not a good idea to continue using an SD card that has already corrupted data once.
The best course of action would be to recover your data to a safe place and buy a new SD card. There are various ways you can go about recovering your data. If you need to carry out a RAW SD data recovery for video files, none of these methods is quite as good as the Recoverit Data Recovery Ultimate application.
Whichever course of action you choose to take, don't try and use the card until you have tried recovering the data from it. Otherwise, you'll increase the risk of losing the lot.
RAW is a state that an SD card attains when, for a variety of reasons, its file system has been damaged. Your computer's operating system and all other devices will not be able to read the file system of a RAW SD card, and will give you a prompt to format RAW SD card. You should, however, know that all its contents will undoubtedly be lost. If you fix your SD card by formatting, you can continue using it. This is, however, not a good idea, as it will almost always corrupt your data again. Sometimes one method of formatting will fail to fix your SD card, and you need to try other ways of formatting.
Before making any system changes, match your current memory card symptoms with the matrix below to select the safest troubleshooting pathway:
| Active System Symptom | Root System Cause | Immediate Safe Action |
| Windows prompts: "You need to format the disk before you can use it" | File Allocation Table (FAT) or Master Boot Record (MBR) corruption. | Do not format. Run sector-by-sector data recovery first. |
| Card capacity drops drastically (e.g., 64 GB card reads as 31 MB) | Controller firmware error or partition table misalignment. | Scan with Wondershare Recoverit to pull files from unallocated blocks. |
| Filesystem displays as "RAW" in Windows Disk Management | Abrupt removal during write cycles, bad sectors, or virus damage. | Use command-line or administrative tools to reformat after saving data. |
For quick repairs on minor structural logic errors, the native Windows File Explorer interface is the most direct solution.
If File Explorer displays an error or fails to open the drive, Windows Disk Management provides direct access to the disk's partition structures.
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diskmgmt.msc, and press Enter.
When standard graphical interfaces freeze due to broken storage volumes, using the command-line disk partitioning utility provides a deeper, low-level clean.
cmd, right-click on Command Prompt, and choose Run as Administrator to open an elevated console.diskpart into the open terminal window and press Enter to load the command interface environment.list disk and press Enter. Carefully identify your SD card's disk number based on its total storage size. Type select disk X (replace X with your card's exact number index) and press Enter.clean and press Enter to wipe existing partition data. Next, type create partition primary and hit Enter. Finally, execute the layout format string command: format fs=exfat quick (or use fs=ntfs quick / fs=fat32 quick depending on capacity requirements) and press Enter.
PowerShell is an advanced management framework that can bypass block-level write errors that often crash older command utilities.
Get-Disk and hit Enter to view all connected storage volumes. Note the disk number corresponding to your RAW flash memory card.E with your actual target drive letter):Format-Volume -DriveLetter E -FileSystem exFAT -Full -Force
Because formatting completely wipes your storage sectors, running a professional data extraction pass first is vital to saving your files. Wondershare Recoverit specializes in handling complex RAW storage damage, directly addressing corrupted partition tables to rescue your data.
Data loss and corruption is not something that most people anticipate, yet it can happen at any time. Although you can easily repair your SD card by going through the format RAW SD card process, you need to remember that formatting will erase all data from the hard drive. Most times, you would want to recover at least some of your valuable data. This is usually data of sentimental value that you cannot obtain elsewhere, such as vacation or graduation images and videos. Other times it may be data that you can use to prove a case and avoid incurring expenses, like DashCam video files. Therefore, before formatting, you would need to go through a RAW SD card recovery process to recover and repair your data and create a backup.
Recoverit Data Recovery is powerful data recovery software. It helps you get back all your valuable documents, emails, photos, videos, and audio files, quickly and easily from your RAW SD card, laptop, recycle bin, crashed internal hard drive, accidentally formatted SD card and external storage media. Recoverit Ultimate can also help you recover fragmented video, and repair corrupt/broken/damaged video.
Step 1: Connect the RAW SD card
Before launching the Recoverit application, you need to connect the RAW SD card to your computer and verify that it has been detected.
Step 2: Start the Recoverit application on Windows
To launch Recoverit on your computer, double click the "Wondershare Recoverit" icon on your Desktop. If the Recoverit icon is not on the Desktop, you can press the Win button and type "Recoverit" in the search box and then click the application.
Step 3: Select and scan the external device
To recover deleted or corrupted files from the RAW SD card, you need to go to the SD Card Recovery section. Select the SD Card as the target location and click the "Scan" button.
The application will launch a comprehensive scan on the RAW SD card. Depending on the size of files in the storage media, this general scan should take just a few minutes to complete. While the scan is running, you can filter and select specific files, file types, and folders.
The supported file types include various formats of images, videos, audio files, documents, emails, archives, and no extensions. This makes the recovery process faster and simpler in situations where you might just want to recover a few images, videos, or a specific folder in your RAW SD card. You can use the pause and play buttons to suspend and resume the scan whenever you want. If the files you wanted to recover have already appeared, you can click the stop button anytime to stop the data recovery process.
Step 4: Preview and recover files
Before starting the recovery process, the Recoverit application allows you to preview and make sure the files are the correct ones. You have to click on the file, and a thumbnail will appear. A preview window will also appear if you click the "Preview" button or double click a file. Besides viewing the actual file, you can also view some file information, such as the file name, size, path, and when the file was last modified.
If you are satisfied that you have located the correct files, click the "Recover" button to save your data into a safe location.
You can also refer to this tutorial video for RAW SD card data recovery:
If you were having a nervous breakdown about your SD card or external device displaying the RAW file system format, failing to view your data, and showing a prompt to format it, I hope by now you have realized that it is nothing to worry about.
Even though we have gone through a variety of methods that one can use to format RAW SD card, most of them are complex and require a bit of technical knowledge. If you need a quick solution for retrieving your data in a few clicks, the Recoverit Data Recovery application is one of the most simple and effective methods.
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Eleanor Reed
staff Editor