RAW

RAW (in operating systems of the Microsoft Windows NT line) is a designation for an undefined volume file system.

The RAWFS component exists and is built into the kernel itself, but the only purpose of this component is to respond to requests from applications about the size of the volume and the name of the file system.

In fact, the RAW file system does not exist, and the definition of the partition file system as RAW in practice means that none of the file system drivers installed on the operating system recognized the file system name of the disk in the partition (neither as known for FAT, FAT32 nor NTFS ) Due to the fact that:

Disk (volume) is not formatted, There is no correct access to the contents of the disk (volume); The structure of the file system is corrupted. If the disk file system is recognized as RAW, reading data, assigning a volume label, and other operations with this partition (for example, defragmentation or checking for errors) are not possible. In this case, the operating system displays the size of the partition and, when accessing it, suggests that it be formatted. RAW