external HDD RAW filesystem

[BlukyTheHusky]

Hello,

 

I have a problem with my external HDD, i found out it has a RAW filesystem

 

Is there a way to convert it back to NTFS (without losing my files?) 

EDIT: i can reach the files via Ubuntu 

 

Thanks in advance 

[Ronda]

Well, copy the files off the drive, format it, then copy them back on.

Also, from what I gather, RAW isn't a filesystem per se. It's just what Windows calls anything that's not NTFS or FAT. External drives frequently come formatted to exFAT, which depending on the Windows version you might not have support for out of the box.

Seeing as you can access the drive from Ubuntu you can check what the FS is with the 'Disks' utility and if it's exFAT, download Microsoft's patch to enable support for it on Windows.

[BlukyTheHusky]

1 minute ago, Ronda said:

Well, copy the files off the drive, format it, then copy them back on.

Also, from what I gather, RAW isn't a filesystem per se. It's just what Windows calls anything that's not NTFS or FAT. External drives frequently come formatted to exFAT, which depending on the Windows version you might not have support for out of the box.

Seeing as you can access the drive from Ubuntu you can check what the FS is with the 'Disks' utility and if it's exFAT, download Microsoft's patch to enable support for it on Windows.

i don't have a another HDD to copy to

 

[Ronda]

Oh no, nevermind.

There's literally a raw filesystem, which I'm guessing means the drive came unformatted, you didn't format it and maybe the OS didn't prompt you to do that or maybe it did and you declined, so it started writing to it that raw fallback mode.

 

As for formatting without moving the files, I can't say I've any experience doing that, so can't recommend anything. Googling 'raw filesystem' turns up a lot of Windows freeware tools, but how trustworthy they are, I've no idea.

I'd look for places where I could temporarily offload the files instead.