WD external HD changes from NTFS to RAW - how to retrieve data?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a Passport 4TB external HD. I have used this drive and several other WD external drives without incident for several years. Upon connecting it today, it asked me for my password - as it ordinarily does - but instead of showing up under My Computer as ‘My Passport G:’, it shows up as ‘Local Disk G:’ and asks if I want to reformat it. So I went to diskmgmt.msc (see screen capture) and it says this sector is now RAW (note the sector on my other WD HD is NTFS). I contacted Western Digital about this and they said to attempt to retrieve the data using a third party tool M3 Data Recovery.

If M3 Data Recovery doesn’t work, what other options might there be?

M3 Data Recovery looks like it will take a long time (22-23 hrs). Is there possibly a quicker way? Would XCopy work?

What might have been the cause of this?

Does anyone else here have any experience with issues like this? And what was the resolution?

2

This is a bit unusual sounding. NTFS is a disk format, and as far as I know RAW is a type of photo media type of file, not a disk format type.

Before i did anything rash, I would turn of PC and remove the HD then restart PC and once fully booted, re-attach the drive and see if things improve.

3

Thanks for this suggestion - it fixed my RAW type problem.

4

Glad it is fixed. Please click on the Solution button in your post.