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New Drive with no data suddenly shows RAW

Posted: 04 Feb 2017, 23:47
by flyingal
I just bought a new 5TB Western Digital drive. Using Windows 10, I formatted the drive as NTFS, everything seemed okay, I am using this drive as external storage. When I plugged the USB cable into my desktop to use the drive, I found it was now in RAW format, not NTFS. It failed to format when attempted. I used TestDisk to change the RAW to NTFS but no partitions were found. What do I do next to enable this drive to work? I am reluctant to delete the volume because I did that on a different drive having the same problem (before I did some research on the topic) and my 3TB drive in that case can now only access less than 1TB so I don't want to screw up this drive.
Can anyone advise what my next step would be since there currently is no data on the 5TB drive? How do I get this to be NTFS and usable?
Thanks in advance.

Re: New Drive with no data suddenly shows RAW

Posted: 05 Feb 2017, 15:43
by cgrenier
As your message is not about data recovery, you should ask Western Digital directly.
Usually a disk you can't format is a damaged disk.

Re: New Drive with no data suddenly shows RAW

Posted: 05 Feb 2017, 17:30
by flyingal
At the suggestion of the person who replied, I went to the WD forums and with their suggestions, I successfully reformatted the drive to NTFS using a Windows 7 platform. Go figure!