good HDD showing up as RAW asking for format via USB cradle

IN my own experience, a formatted drive suddenly showing up as RAW indicates some kind of hardware failures on that drive. I've had that happen to me three times (all on different drives), the latest being last week -- and in all three cases, the drives were failing. The latest one crashed suddenly and could not be recovered short of commercial data recovery.

My own suggestion is to download and install RecoverMyFiles, run it, and see if it can find any folders or files on that drive. IF it does, then consider buying a license and using that product to recover what you can from the drive.

You could also do the same with the new Minitool Data Recovery app.

Both of these are free to install and try -- to see how well they work -- but both require purchase of a license to do the actual data recovery.

If neither of these work, your drive is likely to be trashed -- as was the case with mine.

Prozak said:

I have a laptop that boots up to windows 7 pro 64 just fine. I went to copy some files to another windows 7 pro 64 machine. I took the HDD out of the laptop and connected it to my external caddy on my desktop. The drive shows up as a healthy drive, but in RAW format. Its asking me to format it.

Why is this happening? I looked around for answers and saw something about permissions, but I don't have the security tab to even change the permissions of the drive.

any help would be appreciated.

Post screenshot of disk managenment please

What happens if you put it back into the laptop.

There are certainly better ways to copy some files.

After you post the Disk mngmt screen shot requested by Kaktussoft

Download and install the free Minitool Partition Wizard (PW) Home edition
Launch PW and post the main window screen shot showing the questionable drive.
See: Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Disk management shows whole disk as 1 partition. It calls it E and is RAW.
PW shows 2 partitions!!! 1 unformatted 11.72GB and 1 "other" siezed 454.04GB.

Both screen taken on same machine within win7?

Is it really 1 partition or 2 (check on other machine)?

I see a usb stick and a hard drive in the latest screenshot. Where is the external disk ... size about 465GB ??