If you no longer have access to the original machine (or a machine with a similar file system), or the cause is not due to incompatibility between your operating system and the present file system, then you will need to repair the damage and recover the data on the drive.

Once you’ve done that, you can copy the data to local storage, format the card to a file system the target computer understands, copy the data back, and insert the card into the target system. Sometimes it’s just a matter of inserting the disk (or SD card) in question into the computer that was used to originally create the files and folders on the device. The good news is that, yes, it is possible to recover lost or inaccessible data from a RAW partition. Is It Possible to Recover Data from a RAW Partition? You could click Initialize, however that would definitely erase all the data housed on the drive. What it is informing us is that the card has not been formatted in such a way that the computer is able to read the card. So when you go to read, say, an SD card formatted with the ext4 file system on a MacBook Pro, chances are good you’ll be informed the disk was not readable by the computer. In some cases, it’s possible to have one system read a device formatted in another platform’s file system type. Linux machines use ext3, ext4, BTRFS, reiser, XFS, and more. On the other hand, macOS uses APFS, HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT (with read-only support for NTFS). More often than not, you’ve simply removed that memory card or USB drive without having the operating system safely removing it first.įor example, most Windows machines use either FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, or NTFS5 file systems.

You might insert an SD card into one machine that reads it properly and the next computer might not understand the file system structure and breaks the partition layout, rendering that device unreadable. Memory cards and removable USB drives are constantly being inserted or attached to different machines.

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