Help Needed: External Hard Drive Error - RAW File System, CHKDSK Not Working, Important Data at Risk!

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

I’m facing a serious issue with my WD My Passport Ultra for Mac portable hard drive. It has around 1.65 TB of important data, and I need help figuring out if I can recover it.

Here’s the problem:

  • I recently tried accessing my drive, but got the error: “Location is not accessible. The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error.”
  • I ran the WMIC Diskdrive check to get the drive’s status, and it showed “OK” (as seen in the image).
  • I tried running CHKDSK with the parameters /f /r, but it came back with “The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.”
  • In Disk Management, the drive shows up, but the file system is displayed as RAW instead of the usual format. (See the attached image showing Disk 1 with two partitions, both showing RAW).

Is it possible to recover the data from a RAW drive? I’m open to using any tools or software recommendations (free or paid) if they have a good chance of recovering my files. I’m hoping there’s a way without losing the data.

Any guidance or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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2

Hi @imtiaz10

Please be informed that Western Digital neither covers Data Recovery under its warranty policy nor has any in-house data recovery service. You may contact any data recovery company of your choice.

Title: Alternate 3rd Party Data Recovery Options link
Link: Third-Party Data Recovery Software for Windows and macOS

Also, have you opened a support case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting: