File system is the main component of any operating system like Microsoft Windows. It is responsible for managing files and directories on your hard drive. File system is very prone to failure and it may render all of your hard drive partitions invisible and inaccessible.

At the same time, your computer may become unbootable and all the stored data becomes inaccessible. When a file system gets damaged, the file system and drive becomes RAW. In such cases, you need to go for Partition Recovery solutions to retrieve missing, lost or inaccessible hard drive partitions and stored data.

In a practical scenario, when you attempt to repair a RAW disk using ChkDsk command line tool, the tool complaints that it is not able to carry out RAW file system recovery. It may give you the following error message:

“The type of the filesystem is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.”

The RAW drive is a hard drive partition, which has not been formatted with the NT file system neither FAT (File Allocation Table) nor NTFS (New Technology File System). RAW file system is a system provided file system drive, which is a last resort for all Input/Output requests needing file system support. When I/O manager calls the active file system to mount the hard drive volume, the RAW file system is always called last as it support all types of disks and tape media.

When the file system corruption occurs, the file system becomes RAW and Windows can not recognize the RAW file system. Thus it can not locate the stored data and access it. This behavior results into serious partition loss situations and Partition Recovery is required to overcome this problem.

File system corruption may take place due to a number of reasons such as virus infection, improper system shutdown, power outages, failed operating system upgrade and so forth. In such cases, Partition Recovery Software come for you rescue to retrieve lost Windows partitions and stored data.

These applications are particularly designed to methodically scan entire hard drive using efficient scanning mechanisms and retrieve lost partitions and data. With interactive and simple graphical user interface, these software are quite easy to use and do not require sound and prior technical skills. Partition Recovery Software do not write anything on the hard drive due to read-only demeanor.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most comprehensive tool to effectively handle partition loss scenarios. It recovers FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file system partitions. This software is compatible with Microsoft Windows 7 RC1, Vista, 2003, XP and 2000.