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.
New Drive with no data suddenly shows RAW
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When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
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cgrenier
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Re: New Drive with no data suddenly shows RAW
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.
Usually a disk you can't format is a damaged disk.
Re: New Drive with no data suddenly shows RAW
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!